The Emotional Elephant & The Rational Rider

 

One of the most important things an individual will ever learn is that our emotions frequently take the lead and steer our rationality, not the other way around. Hume correctly observed that “reason is the slave of the passions”, and decades of psychological and neuroscientific research in the past half a century have confirmed how right Hume was on this. Jonathan Haidt's metaphor of "the elephant and the rider" is perhaps my favourite illustration of this. The elephant represents the intuitive and automatic processes of the mind. The elephant symbolises the part of the mind that is influenced by emotions, habits, and unconscious beliefs. The rider represents the rational, conscious, and controlled processes of the mind, and is responsible for reasoning, logical thinking and decision-making. Haidt chose an elephant instead of a horse to illustrate the size and power of the driver of these feelings and instincts, compared with the comparably small rider trying to direct the elephant’s movements.

In order to think hard and reason well, we have to learn that humans aren’t the rational reasoning-machines we’d like to think we are. A consistent human tendency is that the elephant (emotional mind) often drives our actions, while the rider (rational mind) tries to justify these actions after the fact – and we serve ourselves (and others) well if we can raise awareness (in ourselves and others) when this is happening, especially in complex, tribal and divisive areas like religion and politics.

Understanding that reasoning is often used to support and rationalise initial emotional responses rather than to make purely logical decisions is one of the most enlightening things we can come to understand when engaging in these subjects. When you’re discussing politics or religion with people, your interlocutor is likely to be obliviously following the direction of their emotional elephant while believing they are using rational arguments to justify their beliefs.

There are key bits of wisdom that can be distilled from our awareness of "the elephant and the rider" phenomenon. The first is that if you’re engaging with someone about a particular issue to which they seem wedded, you are contending with not just what they claim to think and believe, but with all of the intuitive, psychological, emotional and tribal elements that are directing their viewpoints, and their familial, social, cultural and emotional investments in their perspectives. The second is that it makes it easier to see why people so often appear to talk past each other in debate, and why they regularly come away even more divided than when they began, and even surer they are right and their opponent is wrong. And the third is that if you want to help someone change their mind on an issue about which you believe they are wrong, you need to appeal to their emotions and feelings first, and perhaps even bond with them in a way in which they can see you as having their best interests at heart, and not as an opponent, because rational arguments are likely to be insufficient if they do not resonate with the intuitive aspects of the person.