The Feeling of Rationality: The Meaning of Neuroscientific Advances for Political Science
Top Cited Papers
- 1 September 2004
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Cambridge University Press (CUP) in Perspectives on Politics
- Vol. 2 (04), 691-706
- https://doi.org/10.1017/s1537592704040459
Abstract
Recent advances in the neurosciences offer a wealth of new information about how the brain works, and how the body and mind interact. These findings offer important and surprising implications for work in political science. Specifically, emotion exerts an impact on political decisions in decisive and significant ways. While its importance in political science has frequently been either dismissed or ignored in favor of theories that privilege rational reasoning, emotion can provide an alternate basis for explaining and predicting political choice and action. In this article, I posit a view of decision making that rests on an integrated notion of emotional rationality.Rose McDermott is the author of Risk Taking in International Relations (1998) and Political Psychology in International Relations (2004) and works largely in the areas of political psychology, experimentation, and American foreign policy. The author is grateful to Jennifer Hochschild, Robert Jervis, and Stephen Rosen for generous and constructive advice and encouragement; and to Gerald Clore, Jonathan Cowden, Thomas Kozachek, Jonathan Mercer, Joanne Miller, Philip Zimbardo, the members of the Political Psychology and Behavior Workshop at Harvard, and anonymous reviewers for useful guidance and suggestions.Passion is a sort of fever in the mind, which ever leaves us weaker than it found us.—William Penn, Fruits of Solitude (1693)We consider affective processing to be an evolutionary antecedent to more complex forms of information processing; but higher cognition requires the guidance provided by affective processing.—Ralph Adolphs and Antonio Damasio, “The Interaction of Affect and Cognition” (2001)Keywords
This publication has 51 references indexed in Scilit:
- Emotional Reactions to the Outcomes of Decisions: The Role of Counterfactual Thought in the Experience of Regret and DisappointmentOrganizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 1998
- Consequences of Regret Aversion 2: Additional Evidence for Effects of Feedback on Decision MakingOrganizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 1997
- Deciding Advantageously Before Knowing the Advantageous StrategyScience, 1997
- Out of Control: Visceral Influences on BehaviorOrganizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 1996
- The Impact of Perceived Control on the Imagination of Better and Worse Possible WorldsPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 1995
- The Return of Phineas Gage: Clues About the Brain from the Skull of a Famous PatientScience, 1994
- Individual and Cultural Differences in Response to Leaders' Nonverbal DisplaysJournal of Social Issues, 1991
- "Happy Warriors": Leaders' Facial Displays, Viewers' Emotions, and Political SupportAmerican Journal of Political Science, 1988
- Norm theory: Comparing reality to its alternatives.Psychological Review, 1986
- Bounded Rationality, Ambiguity, and the Engineering of ChoiceThe Bell Journal of Economics, 1978