Fear, anger, hope: what emotions do to political judgement

Work on emotional appraisal, notably that of Jennifer Lerner and Dacher Keltner, has shown that two negative emotions can produce opposite judgements. Fear tends to increase the perception of risk and to favour caution, while anger tends to reduce it and to favour action, at the same time as it pushes one to look for someone responsible.

This distinction is important, because fear and anger are often filed under the same category of negative emotions supposed to cloud judgement. They do not cloud it in the same way: one narrows attention onto the threat, the other onto the presumed author.

It has an immediate practical consequence. The same fact presented in a way that arouses fear or anger will produce different answers to the same question, without any new information having been supplied. That is precisely what communication professionals work on.

Positive emotions also have effects of their own: they increase tolerance for risk and attention paid to possible gains, while reducing the examination of unfavourable scenarios. A proposal presented in an enthusing register is less often submitted to the question of cost.

There is therefore no recommendable emotion and no emotion to be banned in order to judge well. There are systematic effects whose knowledge makes it possible to know which check we are missing at a given moment.

One emotion deserves a special mention: disgust. Work that has taken an interest in it observes that it makes judgements more categorical and less sensitive to arguments, probably because it signals an avoidance rather than a problem to be solved. When a debate shifts into that register, persuasion stops working.

The idea of an ideally cold citizen, judging without affect, corresponds to nothing known. Work in the neuroscience of decision shows that the absence of affective appraisal produces not better decisions but interminable ones, for want of a criterion to decide between acceptable options.

Emotion thus plays the role of a signal: it indicates what matters to us and therefore in which direction to look. The problem is not that it intervenes, it is that it decides alone, without the corresponding check having been made.

A strong emotion in the face of a question is itself a piece of data: it signals that the question touches on something that matters to you. Suppressing it does not improve judgement, whereas naming it makes it possible to choose the appropriate check.

Under the effect of fear, look for the scenarios in which the risk is overestimated and the cases in which the dreaded measure has already been applied elsewhere. Under the effect of anger, examine whether there really is an identifiable person responsible, or whether the damage results from a chain of events with no author. Under the effect of enthusiasm, look for the cost nobody has costed.

The items that provoke an immediate reaction in you deserve a second look, not because your answer would be wrong, but because that is where the essential part of your position is played out. They are also the ones on which your answer would vary most according to the context of the day.

Conversely, the questions that leave you cold produce stable answers but ones that are not very informative about what engages you. A profile reads better when one knows how to distinguish the two.