How Your Emotions Decide Your Fate
Emotions exist for a reason. You might think of a perfectly rational decision maker as an emotionless, intelligent robot. But emotions help us make crucial decisions quickly. When you hear a deep growl coming from the bushes next to you, your best bet is to jump and start running. If you stop to calculate risks, probabilities, and payoff matrices for the various actions you could take, rather like a robot might do, you could be too late.
Like most good things in life, emotional reactions also come with costs. For example, many people are terrified of flying, even though data show that it’s the safest method of passenger transport. Why are people terrified? Because if your evolutionary ancestors hadn’t developed a deep-rooted fear of heights, they’d have been more likely to fall off a cliff and lose their place in the gene pool.
Cars are far more likely to kill you than planes are, and yet they don’t give us the same fearful feeling. Since we had no way to travel a dangerous 100 mph before motorized vehicles were invented, there was no pressure to evolve the same fear of superhuman speed on the ground.
So there’s occasionally a conflict between your emotional instincts and rational thinking. Here’s the science behind why emotions frequently come out on top.
