The Emotional and Person Experience 11.30.2011

Emotions are very powerful in influencing peoples decisions. Marketing people understand this. Con-artists understand this. Politicians understand this. The main objective of the 'game' is to stir up a certain emotion in your target so that they will be more receptive to your message. For marketing this means generating a feeling of need by creating emotions that feed that feeling. Feelings like emptiness for example or lust or jealousy. Politicians usually play the "fear" card in hopes of getting people to respond to it by voting on them and their solution "to cure the fear".

Basic emotional and state of mind manipulation is all around us. Like in the color schemes of certain shops it's present. The (old) McDonalds "red and yellow"? (And subsequently the use of said color scheme for all other fast food establishments..)

Human experience is another thing which is equally easy to manipulate. By setting up an environment and feeding the target specific information you can have them experience things which aren't real. The person who experienced 'something', however, will always say that what he saw/heard/felt/experienced was indeed real, and how can we blame him? His brain merely processed certain sensory inputs which lead him to believe his experience was real. Oddly enough, people stick to their experience being real, no matter how magical or fantastical that experience seemed to be. Now that is something a person can be blamed for. It's interesting to see how reason and rationality goes right out the window when somebody experiences something they can't readily explain. Instead of saying "Wait, this doesn't make sense. I saw X do  Y, but this can't really be the case, because I know in order for X to do Y it defies certain laws of physics. And X doesn't even exist!", they mostly have an explanation for the experience so that no further investigation is needed.

Ouija boards are a very nice example. It took a very long time before people found out that the movement of the hands on the board are caused by the ideo-motor reflex. (Penn&Teller did an awesome bit about this in one of their Bullsh!t episodes)

I think it's pretty safe to say that we, as the complex bio-social creatures we are, are very impressionable and easily influenced to experience situations and emotions which trick our minds into believing something is real.

Why is it then, that people are so very inclined to trust these emotions and 'personal experience' as basis for a truth claim, when we all know deep down inside how fragile we are? We can show emotions can be falsely generated. We can stick rods in your brain and have you experience all sorts of things. We can, unbeknownst to you, give you meds, which will change your brain chemistry, and have you experience things which aren't real. Why do we, apart from the simple everyday things, stick to personal experience as a barometer for truth?!

Emotion and personal experience make sense as evolutionary tools to guide a humans actions. Having a certain "feeling" about standing near a very deep chasm makes people cautious. Cautious people tend to survive. People who live, tend to procreate. (No rocket science there..) Having experienced a tribe's man attacked by a bear makes a person scared of bears. People who are scared of bears tend to avoid them. People who avoid.. well you get the picture.

Things get trickier in situations which are a little more elaborate. When I ask a girl at a high school dance to talk to, and show interest in, my sulky friend to cheer him up, without telling him I sent her, I've set  up a situation which is fictitious. My friend believes he's totally awesome for having drawn attention of a girl. His experience is exactly that. He was sitting somewhere minding his own business and a girl suddenly talks to him. If I didn't know him, and if I didn't nudge the girl to go have a chat with him, he would never have had that experience. More importantly, his belief that he is an awesome ladies man would also not have formed, because he really isn't!

What I mean to say is, an argument from emotion or personal experience isn't an argument. It's a justification, a personal justification, nothing more. It can't ever be used as a reason for another person to believe in what you claim is true.

Whenever a person defends his position with an argument from emotion this should immediately trigger some signal flags in his/her head, or at least in the head of the person listening to the argument being presented. When you defend your position with emotions or personal experiences, you're talking about something subjective to you, which means that it is more likely than not, never a truth.

I wish more people would evaluate the things they say like this. Whenever they say anything is true, think about it, "what is my justification to think this?". If the justification is "Because it makes me feel happy" or "Because 10.000.000 other people think the same way" or "Because i just feel it's right" or "Because this ancient scripture says so", you might want to re-evaluate your position.

There's a reason why the method of "Questioning, hypothesizing, testing and sharing" has taken away many, many superstitions. It's been proven to be consistantly true, precisely because it is testable and self-correcting. Not being able to say a thing you believe in is wrong, not ever, that makes it inherently false, no matter how you personally or emotionally justify it.