Emotional Pliability

I’m going to start with a quote from one of the minor characters from 2009’s reboot of Star Trek, Ambassador Sarek:

Emotions run deep within our race. In many ways more deeply than in humans. Logic offers a serenity humans seldom experience. The control of feelings so that they do not control you.

One of my previous posts – “Political Red Shoes” – has been resonating in my mind like a tuning fork stuck between two concrete notes. The idea behind that post was solid, but I have been shadowed by the idea that I may have been missing a key point in the process of finishing it up before Ms. Fussypants once again demanded my attention.

Today, I feel like I may have stumbled upon that missing angle: the emotional pliability which comes from emotions like anger, hatred, and fear – all of which are key components of perception management… which falls under one of my favorite themes in this blog: information warfare.

As I have stated before: the crafting of public opinion, in terms of information warfare, is not a new phenomenon. The use of emotion to craft a desired course of action has been realized long ago; guys like Walter Lippman and Edward Bernays refined the concept over a century ago.

In 1921, Lippman wrote:

There are no end of things which can arouse the emotion, and no end of things which can satisfy it. This is particularly true where the stimulus is only dimly and indirectly perceived, and where the objective is likewise indirect.

Seven years later, Bernays followed suit:

…[T]he group has mental characteristics distinct from those of the individual, and is motivated by impulses and emotions which cannot be explained on the basis of what we know of individual psychology. So the question naturally arose: If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it?

Since the discipline of history was my chosen direction, I humbly defer any in-depth discussions over the evolution of the study of cognitive psychology to the experts who are more than capable of providing a more detailed discussion of the changes and discoveries over the last 100 years. However, the question lingers: with all of the technological advancements since then, have we willingly forgotten how emotionally pliable we can be?

It would be simple to make the claim that our ability to be rational in the face of strong emotions is a case of wanting but not getting the results we would like. Politically charged discussions are often (and unfortunately) minefields of emotions: cynicism, fear, and hatred… and the ability for the individual or group to disengage from those emotions sows even more mines as positions become entrenched and perceptions are cemented into absolutes.

We are not that simple, however.

In my quick digging for a tangible idea behind this post, I came across an article discussing the results from recent research into the strange world of experimental psychology and cognitive science. Working from the hypothesis that the emotional state influences reason, a series of four experiments were conducted in 2014; the results were ambiguous, at best:

Thus far the key finding is that emotional state and content may interact to modulate logical reasoning. This is however only the case if (mood) state and (task) content are related. But, this does so far not generalize to other contexts, since it could for example not be found in a sample with exam anxiety. These ambiguities, the role of working memory and attentional processes need to be addressed in future studies in order to explain the influence of emotional content and emotion on human reasoning performance.

That last sentence says it all, really, and could be summarized by four words: “We don’t know… yet.”

Returning to my original point of emotional pliability, while trained professionals may have plenty to ponder on this matter, I can say that personal experience has shown that anger is often the least likely emotion conducive for reason and critical thinking. I have been mad and made mistakes; likewise, I have been able to use someone else’s anger to my benefit when they grew impatient or careless.

Perhaps this is what is going on in our present-day society: since anger is a relatively cheap and effective emotion to elicit, that emotion is being used to draw more eyeballs to an increasingly competitive media market or scrape up more support for one political party or another. With the former, our attention has become a commodity more than it had been in the past with print and television media; with the latter, the clamoring for those politically unaffiliated has turned public service into what is best (and crudely) described as a “monkey shit fight at the zoo.”

Where will this bring us in the next election cycle… or the one after that… or the four after that…?

My prediction is that the static will strengthen until a breaking point is reached. I cannot see any sign of relenting in the ongoing bickering over perceptions. However, all is not “doom and gloom” – the more insane things get, the more the insanity becomes obvious to those who choose to pay attention… and the more cherished and valued true friendships, leadership, and perspective becomes.