Any description of human behavior should have something to say about the complicated relationship we have with our emotions.
I’m someone who longs to be rational and well-reasoned in most of what I do, but upon reflection, I can see how frequently my life is, instead, steered by emotion. This shouldn’t come as a surprise: Decades of research, synthesized in a research article published in the Public Administration Review, have concluded that human decision-making is complex and not easily explained by a single model.
Those two forces—rationality and emotion—seem to cooperate and compete inside me. What’s to be done when one of them throws my whole being out of balance?…