Are People Rational Beings?
People are - unlike animals - considered rational beings. They don't act only upon instincts and emotions but also on rationality. But is it actually true?
There is this idea that we have to deal with the battle between rational and emotional decision-making on a daily basis. For example, there is an emotion that tells me to buy a cake and eat it whole. My rationality tells me not to, as it's not healthy and my stomach will hurt. And it's up to me to decide which voice I listen to.
In fact, both of these decisions are nothing but emotions. There is an emotion that tells me to eat the cake and the other emotion that doesn't want me to suffer in the future.
It's also very strange to call certain decisions emotionally-driven while others purely rational. Actually, it's totally subjective. You can make a decision and for some people, it could be a completely emotional and irrational decision, but for others, it's quite rational.
And it seems that everybody considers their own decisions and opinions to be rational. Many people think that everything they do is based on facts and logic, while others are simply stupid.
I would say emotions back every single decision. Imagine you had to decide between a Lenovo or HP laptop. Your decision could be pretty straightforward because Lenovo has better specifications (bigger capacity of hard-drive, more RAM) so you probably buy Lenovo. What matters here are simple numbers.
But what if there were still emotions? What if you buy Lenovo simply because you have more experience with this brand and most of your friends recommended it to you?
Now imagine a wizard casts a spell on you and makes you like HP more. Then you might choose HP despite the worse specifications. You might justify it like: "Capacity of the hard-drive and RAM is not everything!" or something, and it might sound logical to you. But you're saying it to yourself just because you want to justify a decision based only on emotion.
So are people rational beings? I would say no… some decisions are more complex than others, but deep down they are always emotional.
Now that's bad news, right? That means that we are nothing but slaves of our emotions? Actually, I would say it's pretty liberating to finally admit that you might not be that "objective" and "unbiased" as you always thought you are.