Emotions can lead to bias and cloud judgment but can also provide motivation. To make reliable decisions, it is advised not to trust thoughts formed during emotional moments. Instead, pause and wait for the intense emotion to subside before acting. Emotions are like advisors, signaling when a moral or ethical boundary is crossed, but many ancient emotional responses are now outdated due to the presence of modern legal systems. By understanding the purpose behind emotions, one can detach from them, viewing them as evolutionary constructs rather than commands to follow. This understanding allows for the creation of a pause between a triggering event and one's response, fostering a more thoughtful and considered reaction.
Gurwinder Bhogal is a programmer and a writer.
Gurwinder is one of my favourite Twitter follows. He’s written yet another megathread exploring human nature, cognitive biases, mental models, status games, crowd behaviour and social media. It’s fantastic, and today we go through some of my favourites.
Expect to learn why our mental model of the world assumes people are just like us, why Narcissists tend to inject themselves into every story no matter how unrelated or tenuous, the role of Postjournalism in a world of fake news, why we navigate the world through stories and not statistics or facts, why people specialise in things they are actually bad at and much more...