Trust your gut.
Over the last few decades, there has been a global push to put far more weight on our feelings and to act on our gut, our intuition. It has even been positioned that our intuition knows better than our conscious thought, so acting on how we feel is the logical thing to do. What of course has been omitted from the drive to be emotional actors, is that our intuition is based on our experience and therefore, can be found very lacking, as it answers the wrong question and therefore, suggests the wrong course of action. Not only that, because acting on how we feel automatically makes us feel like we are doing the right thing. It is only in hindsight we might be able to recognise that upon reflection, what we thought was right, was not right at all. What we often omit to protect our ego, is that if we had slowed down and thought about the situation a little longer, we would have realised that our intuition was giving false positives.
Do you know anyone who has been conned? A member of my extended family was swindled by one of those online love scams, where she (an elderly woman) was convinced to send tens of thousands of dollars to a person who she thought needed help for some family issue and blah blah. It was obviously a scam but with her inexperience, rather than thinking through the situation logically, she used the sympathy she felt for the person as her guiding force for action.
Sympathy for a psychopath.
I don't think that the person was necessarily a psychopath, but the play they run for this type of scam resembles the behaviours of a psychopath, as it preys on the vulnerabilities of emotional decision making. And without experience, the intuition of the mark says "I've got this" and doesn't engage the slow thinking processes that would uncover all the inconsistencies and subsequent risks of the situation. Often, even if the person seeks advice from others (they didn't in this case) the emotional decision making process will overpower the advice of others who would warn against trusting the conman.
Our emotions are extremely strong triggers.
Which is why they are so dangerous to trust. The idea of "trigger" has become popular in recent years with people getting triggered by this and that. But I think that it isn't the event that causes the trigger as mush as a lack of ability to apply the right processing system (type 1 as fast and type 2 as slow) before acting. We have been encouraged to trust our system one thought process, which means we aren't going to wake up the system two one at all. We will feel empathy and sympathy and also feel that we are correct in feeling those things, without vetting whether we should or not.
While the situation can trigger the emotion, should the emotion trigger an action?
I am not so sure. At least, some of the time when stakes are higher. For instance, an elderly woman losing her life savings for retirement is a pretty high stakes situation for her, which should automatically set the system two processes into gear. But those processes also have to be trained for what to look for, and where to get help, and who to actually trust prior to the decision making process, otherwise it might just kick it back to system one, which often happens.
As I see it, critical thinking is becoming weaker in people and the new technologies are making it even weaker in us again. Essentially, we are becoming increasingly gullible, because instead of thinking through a problem, we are feeling through the problem instead. And it feels rational to do so, because we have been conditioned to "trust ourselves" even when the problem we face is an unknown that we have no experience in. And of course, because we are lazy thinkers and actors by nature, we will end up choosing the solution that is the easiest for us to accept. For some, that means trusting people in situations where consideration is needed, which makes us blind to all the red flags waving about. We are using our attention to act on the feeling, rather than our attention to understand the situation.
What is interesting is that pretty much everyone believes that their actions are carefully considered, even though the majority of what we do in a day is automatic. We don't want to believe that we would leave important decisions up to unchecked emotions, so we don't believe it. We create a story that our actions are based on what we consciously decided, instead of an emotion triggered by our unconscious.
So much of our daily experience can no longer be trusted, which is why it is so easy to be taken advantage of. There is so much scam, manipulation and influence being pushed at us, and we are so poor at using our slow thinking, that the flood of information overwhelms us and we just take it all at face value, whether it be a phishing scam, or the plethora of AI-generated content that pours through the platform feeds. Even if we do try and slow down our thinking, our fear of missing out will overpower the system again to force more intuitive solutioning, instead of critical thought.
There are times and a places to act on emotions. Live in the moment when you are playing with your child, act on feeling when in bed with your partner. But when the stakes are high or when money is involved, slow down and think consciously.
Taraz
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