by David Robson
The benefits of emotion differentiation don’t end there. Besides being more equipped to disentangle the sources of their feelings, people with more precise emotional vocabularies also tend to have more sophisticated ways of regulating their feelings when they threaten to get out of hand. A stock market trader, for instance, would be better able to get back on their feet after a string of losses, rather than sinking into despair or attempting to win it all back with increasingly risky gambles.
Sensible regulation strategies include self-distancing, which we explored in the last chapter, and reappraisal, which involves reinterpreting the feelings in a new light. It could also involve humour – cracking a joke to break the tension; or a change of scene. Perhaps you simply realise that you need to get away from the table and take a deep breath. But whatever strategy you use, you can only regulate those feelings once you have already identified them.
For these reasons, people with poor interoception,20 and low emotional differentiation, are less likely to keep their feelings under wraps before they get out of hand.* Regulation is therefore the final cog in our emotional compass, and, together, those three interconnected components – interoception, differentiation and regulation – can powerfully direct the quality of our intuition and decision making.21
* It is risky to read too much into Kroc’s autobiography, Grinding It Out. But he certainly seems to describe some sophisticated strategies to regulate his emotions when they get out of hand, which he claimed to have picked up earlier in his career. As he put it (pp. 61-2): ‘I worked out a system that allowed me to turn off nervous tension and shut out nagging questions . . . I would think of my mind as being a blackboard full of messages, most of them urgent, and I practiced imagining a hand with an eraser wiping that blackboard clean. I made my mind completely blank. If a thought began to appear, zap! I’d wipe it out before it could form.’
I hope you are now convinced that engaging with your feelings is not a distraction from good reasoning, but an essential part of it. By bringing our emotions to the mind’s surface, and dissecting their origins and influence, we can treat them as an additional and potentially vital source of information. They are only dangerous when they go unchallenged.
Some researchers call these skills emotional intelligence, but although the description makes literal sense, I’ll avoid that term to reduce confusion with some of the more questionable EQ tests that we discussed in Part 1. Instead, I’ll describe them as reflective thinking, since they all, in some ways, involve turning your awareness inwards to recognise and dissect your thoughts and feelings.
Like the strategies that we explored in the last chapter, these abilities shouldn’t be seen as some kind of rival to traditional measures of intelligence and expertise, but as complementary behaviours that ensure we apply our reasoning in the most productive way possible, without being derailed by irrelevant feelings that would lead us off track.
Crucially – and this fact is often neglected, even in the psychological literature – these reflective skills also offer some of the best ways of dealing with the very specific cognitive biases that Kahneman and Tversky studied. They protect us from dysrationalia.
Consider the following scenario, from a study by Wändi Bruine de Bruin (who designed one of the decision-making tests that we explored in Chapter 2).
You have driven halfway to a vacation destination. Your goal is to spend time by yourself – but you feel sick, and you now feel that you would have a much better weekend at home. You think that it is too bad that you already drove halfway, because you would much rather spend the time at home.
What would you do? Stick with your plans, or cancel them?
This is a test of the sunk cost fallacy – and lots of people state that they would prefer not to waste the drive they’ve already taken. They keep on ruminating about the time they would lose, and so they try in vain to make the best of it – even though the scenario makes it pretty clear that they’ll have to spend the vacation in discomfort as a result. Bruine de Bruin, however, has found that this is not true of the people who can think more reflectively about their feelings in the ways that Feldman Barrett and others have studied.22
A Romanian study has found similar benefits with the framing effect. In games of chance, for instance, people are more likely to choose options when they are presented as a gain (i.e. 40 per cent chance of winning) compared with when they are presented as a loss (60 per cent chance of losing) – even when they mean exactly the same thing. But people with more sophisticated emotion regulation are resistant to these labelling effects and take a more rational view of the probabilities as a result.23
Being able to reappraise our emotions has also been shown to protect us against motivated reasoning in highly charged political discussions, determining a group of Israeli students’ capacity to consider the Palestinian viewpoint during a period of heightened tension.24
It should come as little surprise, then, that an emotional self-awareness should be seen as a prerequisite for the intellectually humble, open-minded thinking that we studied in the last chapter. And this is reflected in Igor Grossmann’s research on evidence-based wisdom, which has shown that the highest performers on his wise reasoning tests are indeed more attuned to their emotions, capable of distinguishing their feelings in finer detail while also regulating and balancing those emotions so that their passions do not come to rule their actions.25
This idea is, of course, no news to philosophers. Thinkers from Socrates and Plato to Confucius have argued that you cannot be wise about the world around you if you do not first know yourself. The latest scientific research shows that this is not some lofty philosophical ideal; incorporating some moments of reflection into your day will help de-bias every decision in your life.
The good news is that most people’s reflective skills naturally improve over the course of their lifetime; in ten years’ time you’ll probably be slightly better equipped to identify and command your feelings than you are today.
But are there any methods to accelerate that process?
One obvious strategy is mindfulness meditation, which trains people to listen to their body’s sensations and then reflect on them in a non-judgemental way. There is now strong evidence that besides its many, well-documented health benefits, regular practise of mindfulness can improve each element of your emotional compass – interoception, differentiation and regulation – meaning that it is the quickest and easiest way to de-bias your decision making and hone your intuitive instincts.26 (If you are sceptical, or simply tired of hearing about the benefits of mindfulness, bear with me – you will soon see that there are other ways to achieve some of the same effects.)
Andrew Hafenbrack, then at the Institut Européen d’Administration des Affaires in France, was one of the first to document these cognitive effects in 2014. Using Bruine de Bruin’s tests, he found that a single fifteen-minute mindfulness session can reduce the incidence of the sunk cost bias by 34 per cent. That’s a massive reduction – of a very common bias – for such a short intervention.27
By allowing us to dissect our emotions from a more detached perspective, mindfulness has also been shown to correct the myside biases that come from a threatened ego,28 meaning people are less defensive when they are faced with criticism29 and more willing to consider others’ perspectives, rather than doggedly sticking to their own views.30
Meditators are also more likely to make rational choices in an experimental task known as the ‘ultimatum game’ that tests how we respond to unfair treatment by others. You play it in pairs, and one partner is given some cash and offered the option to share as much of the money as they want with the other participant. The catch is that the receiver can choose to reject the offer if they think it’s unfair – and if that happens, both parties lose everything.
Many people do reject small offers out of sheer spite, even though it means they are ultimately worse off – making it an irrational decision. But across multiple rounds of the game, the medita
tors were less likely to make this choice. For example, when the opponent offered a measly $1 out of a possible $20, only 28 per cent of the non-meditators accepted the money, compared to 54 per cent of the meditators who could set their anger aside to make the rational choice. Crucially, this tolerance correlated with the meditator’s interoceptive awareness, suggesting that their more refined emotional processing had contributed to their wiser decision making.31
Commanding your feelings in this way would be particularly important during business negotiations, when you need to remain alert to subtle emotional signals from others without getting swept away by strong feelings when the discussions don’t go to plan. (Along these lines, a Turkish study has found that differences in emotion regulation can account for 43 per cent of the variation in simulated business negotiations.32)
Having started meditating to deal with the stress at INSEAD, Hafenbrack says that he has now witnessed all these benefits himself. ‘I’m able to disconnect the initial stimulus from my response – and that second or two can make a huge difference in whether you overreact to something or if you respond in a productive way,’ he told me from the Católica-Lisbon School of Business and Economics in Portugal, where he is now a professor of organisational science. ‘It makes it easier to think what’s really the best decision right now.’
If mindfulness really isn’t your thing, there may be other ways to hone intuitive instincts and improve your emotion regulation. A series of recent studies has shown that musicians (including string players and singers) and professional dancers have more fine-tuned interoception.33 The scientists behind these studies suspect that training in these disciplines – which all rely on precise movements guided by sensory feedback – naturally encourages greater bodily awareness.
You don’t need to actively meditate to train your emotion differentiation either. Participants in one study were shown a series of troubling images and told to describe their feelings to themselves with the most precise words possible.34 When shown a picture of a child suffering, for example, they were encouraged to question whether they were feeling sadness, pity or anger, and to consider the specific differences between those feelings.
After just six trials, the participants were already more conscious of the distinctions between different emotions, and this meant that they were subsequently less susceptible to priming during a moral reasoning task. (By improving their emotion regulation the same approach has, incidentally, also helped a group of people to overcome their arachnophobia.35)
The effects are particularly striking, since, like the mindfulness studies, these interventions are incredibly short and simple, with the benefits of a single session enduring more than a week later; even a little bit of time to think about your feelings in more detail will pay lasting dividends.
At the very basic level, you should make sure that you pick apart the tangled threads of feeling, and routinely differentiate emotions such as apprehension, fear and anxiety; contempt, boredom and disgust; or pride, satisfaction and admiration. But given these findings, Feldman Barrett suggests that we also try to learn new words – or invent our own – to fill a particular niche on our emotional awareness.
Just think of the term ‘hangry’ – a relatively recent entry into the English language that describes the particular irritability when we haven’t eaten.36 Although we don’t necessarily need psychological research to tell us that low blood sugar will cause an accompanying dip in your mood and a dangerously short fuse, naming the concept means that we are now more aware of the feeling when it does happen, and better able to account for the ways it might be influencing our thinking.
In his Dictionary of Lost Sorrows, the writer and artist John Koenig shows just the kind of sensitivity that Feldman Barrett describes, inventing words such as ‘liberosis’, the desire to care less about things, and ‘altschmerz’ – a weariness with the same old issues you’ve always had. According to the scientific research, enriching our vocabulary in this way isn’t just a poetic exercise: looking for, and then defining, those kinds of nuances will actually change the way you think in profound ways.37
If you are really serious about fine-tuning your emotional compass, many of the researchers also suggest that you spend a few minutes to jot down your thoughts and feelings from the day and the ways they might have influenced your decisions. Not only does the writing process encourage deeper introspection and the differentiation of your feelings, which should naturally improve your intuitive instincts; it also ensures you learn and remember what worked and what didn’t, so you don’t make the same mistakes twice.
You may believe you are too busy for this kind of reflection, but the research suggests that spending a few minutes in introspection will more than pay for itself in the long run. A study by Francesca Gino at Harvard University, for instance, asked trainees at an IT centre in Bangalore to devote just fifteen minutes a day to writing and reflecting on the lessons they had learnt, while drawing out the more intuitive elements of their daily tasks. After eleven days, she found that they had improved their performance by 23 per cent, compared to participants who had spent the same time actively practising their skills.38 Your daily commute may be the obvious period to engage your mind in this way.
Comprenez-vous cette phrase? Parler dans une langue étrangère modifie l’attitude de l’individu, le rendant plus rationnel et plus sage!
We will shortly see how reflective thinking can potentially save lives. But if you are lucky enough to be bilingual – or willing to learn – you can add one final strategy to your new decision-making toolkit – called the foreign language effect.
The effect hinges on the emotional resonances within the words we speak. Linguists and writers have long known that our emotional experience of a second language will be very different from that of our mother tongue; Vladimir Nabokov, for instance, claimed to feel that his English was ‘a stiffish, artificial thing’ compared to his native Russian, despite becoming one of the language’s most proficient stylists: it simply didn’t have the same deep resonance for him.39 And this is reflected in our somatic markers, like the sweat response: when we hear messages in another language, the emotional content is less likely to move the body.
Although that may be a frustration for writers such as Nabokov, Boaz Keysar at the University of Chicago’s Center for Practical Wisdom has shown that it may also offer us another way to control our emotions.
The first experiment, published in 2012, examined the framing effect, using English speakers studying Japanese and French, and Korean speakers learning English. In their native languages, the participants were all influenced by whether the scenarios were presented as ‘gains’ or ‘losses’. But this effect disappeared when they used their second language. Now, they were less easily swayed by the wording and more rational as a result.40
The ‘foreign language effect’ has since been replicated many times in many other countries, including Israel and Spain, and with many other cognitive biases, including the ‘hot hand illusion’ – the belief, in sport or gambling, that success at one random event means we are more likely to have similar luck in the future.41
In each case, people were more rational when they were asked to reason in their second language, compared with their first. Our thinking may feel ‘stiffish’, as Nabokov put it, but the slight emotional distance means that we can think more reflectively about the problem at hand.42
Besides offering this immediate effect, learning another language can improve your emotion differentiation, as you pick up new ‘untranslatable’ terms that help you see more nuance in your feelings. And by forcing you to see the world through a new cultural lens, it can exercise your actively open-minded thinking, while the challenge of grappling with unknown phrases increases your ‘tolerance of ambiguity’, a related psychological measure which means that you are better equipped to cope with feelings of uncertainty rather than jumping to a conclusion too quickly. Besides reducing bias, that’s also thought to be essential for crea
tivity; tolerance of ambiguity is linked to entrepreneurial innovation, for instance.43
Given the effort involved, no one would advise that you learn a language solely to improve your reasoning – but if you already speak one or have been tempted to resuscitate a language you left behind at school, then the foreign language effect could be one additional strategy to regulate your emotions and improve your decision making.
If nothing else, you might consider the way it influences your professional relationships with international colleagues; the language you use could determine whether they are swayed by the emotions behind the statement or the facts. As Nelson Mandela once said: ‘If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.’
One of the most exciting implications of the research on emotional awareness and reflective thinking is that it may finally offer a way to resolve the ‘the curse of expertise’. As we saw in Chapter 3, greater experience can lead experts to rely on fuzzy, gist-based intuitions that often offer rapid and efficient decision making, but can also lead to error. The implication might have seemed to be that we would need to lose some of that efficiency, but the latest studies show that there are ways to use those flashes of insight while reducing the needless mistakes.
The field of medicine has been at the forefront of these explorations – for good reason. Currently, around 10?15 per cent of initial diagnoses are incorrect, meaning many doctors will make at least one error for every six patients they see. Often these errors can be corrected before harm is done, but it is thought that in US hospitals alone, around one in ten patient deaths – between 40,000 and 80,000 per annum – can be traced to a diagnostic mistake.44