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These findings also are important to consider as we think about our true orientation toward people versus the orientation that, especially in business environments, we sometimes believe we take. We like to think we are rational, and that our emotions are secondary. This is not unusual in Western cultures. We have a long history of valuing the rational over the emotional. But really, how rational are we?

In the age of bifurcated media and social media streams that let us select who and what we are exposed to, it is obvious that politic differences create different “realities” in our experience of what is going on in the world around us. But Yale University law professor Daniel Kahan, along with psychologists Ellen Peters from Ohio State University, Erica Dawson from Cornell University, and Paul Slovic from the University of Oregon, decided to explore whether, for example, our politics might affect our ability to do something we consider very “rational” indeed: math problems.^[16] Kahan gave more than one thousand participants in his study a tricky math problem to compute. In the first version, the question he posed involved the results of a clinical study of skin cream. Fifty-nine percent of the participants got the problem wrong.

Then he decided to add a more emotional component. He took the same numbers and framed them as a question about the effectiveness of laws against concealed handguns, a highly political and emotional issue. He and his colleagues found that “conservative Republicans were much less likely to correctly interpret data suggesting that a gun ban decreased crime in a city; for liberal Democrats, the exact opposite was true. The people who were normally best at mathematical reasoning, moreover, were the most susceptible to getting the politically charged question wrong.”^[17]

We are trained to think we can talk people out of their points of view if we give them the right “evidence.” But what this study demonstrated was that political biases actually distort our ability to reason logically. In the battle between emotion and rationality, emotion usually wins!

In a similar study, Brendan Nyhan, assistant professor of government at Dartmouth College, found that when voters are misinformed, factual information only makes them become more rigid in their point of view! Nyhan found these instances of facts making people more rigid:

 People who thought weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq believed that misinformation even more strongly when they were shown a news story correcting that belief.

 People who thought George W. Bush banned all stem cell research kept thinking he did that even after they were shown an article saying that only some federally funded stem cell work was stopped.

 People who said the economy was the most important issue to them, and who disapproved of Barack Obama’s economic record, were shown a graph of nonfarm employment over the prior year. It included a rising line that indicated about one million jobs were added. They were asked whether the number of people with jobs had gone up, down, or stayed about the same. Many, looking straight at the graph, said down.[18]

All of this might suggest that the age-old adage is true: “Never let the facts get in the way of a good story!”

A source of much of this thinking goes back almost twenty-five centuries to Plato. In one of his dialogues, the Phaedrus, Plato explained the way humans experienced the world through an allegory of a chariot. Describing love as “divine madness,” Plato describes the charioteer driving a chariot pulled by two winged horses:

First the charioteer of the human soul drives a pair, and secondly one of the horses is noble and of noble breed, but the other quite the opposite in breed and character. Therefore, in our case the driving is necessarily difficult and troublesome.

In this allegory, the charioteer represents our rational intellect, the part of our soul that must keep the horses, our passionate nature and our righteousness (extreme positive emotions), and our more lustful negative emotions in check. It is only when the charioteer is “in charge” that we can move forward toward enlightenment.

For 2,500 years, we have worshipped at the altar of the rational. Think about how embedded it is in our language. “Are you sure you’re being rational about that? Aren’t you being too emotional?”

It turns out that we are far less “rational” then we are “rationalizing,” and the lack of awareness of that may get in the way of our ability to think as clearly as we might. The renowned neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio, discussed this in his book Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain.

In the book, Damasio described his encounter with a patient he called “Elliott.” Elliott had a brain tumor removed that had caused ventromedial frontal lobe damage. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex is the part of the prefrontal cortex that processes risk and fear. It plays a major role in managing our emotional responses and decision making. Elliott, who had been a successful businessman and family man, was struggling. Despite the fact that he still registered very high intelligence (his IQ was in the ninety-seventh percentile), everything around him, his businesses, and his marriage, were failing. One would think that somebody without the pull of emotions would make very “rational” decisions. However, Elliott seemed to lack any motivation at all. Damasio wrote that “he was always controlled. Nowhere was there a sense of his own suffering, even though he was the protagonist. I never saw a tinge of emotion in my many hours of conversation with him: no sadness, no impatience, no frustration.”

Damasio found that without access to his emotions, Elliott was incapable of making even the simplest of decisions. Each small decision seemed to take him forever. He took long periods of time to choose what to write with, whether or not to make an appointment, or decide where to eat lunch. He concluded that “Elliott emerged as a man with a normal intellect who was unable to decide properly, especially when the decision involved personal or social matters.”

Damasio described Elliott as an “uninvolved spectator” in his own life. Once the emotional part of his brain had been disabled, he was virtually unable to make any decisions.^[19]

We live with this inherent dichotomy between the rational decisions we think we are supposed to be making, and the real impact of our unconscious processing and our emotional reactions, which can remain under the surface, unobserved and, often, discounted. We want to think of ourselves as good people, but we still have these emotional impulses. This can create an enormous dissonance between what we think we see and evaluate and what’s actually going on. In Freudian terms, the id, our instinctive impulses, react and feel one way, but our superego, our inner controller and manager, tries to keep them under control by burying them deep in our unconscious. We know, for example, that we are “not supposed to be biased,” and so we convince ourselves that we are not, even sometimes in the face of evidence to the contrary.

In fact, one of the many remarkable contradictions we see in this research is that intelligent people with high self-esteem may be the most likely to develop blind spots about their biases. Philip Dodgson and Joanne Wood, both psychologists at the University of Waterloo, found that people with high self-esteem respond less to weaknesses than people with low self-esteem. As a result they may be less likely to internalize negative thoughts or ideas about themselves. Not only that, but intelligent people often can rationalize their own bias as justified. The more sophisticated we are in coming up with explanations for our opinions, the more we see them as truth!^[20]

In addition, the cultures we grow up in give us a particular set of standards and rules to live by, which inherently are defined by “not like them!” guidelines. Our standards become the foundation of our inner “book of rules,” and others appear to us as simply wrong. Because our identities are formed around this ego identification, we see ourselves as “right” and the “other” as “wrong” or “flawed” in some way.

There is nothing wrong with this process. It is inherent in every human being, but it creates real mischief for us in understanding how we are responding to others because we are largely unaware of it. Let’s now look at how the brain seems to make all of this happen.

1.

Donald A. Redelmeier and Simon D. Baxter, “Rainy Weather and Medical School Admission Interviews,” Canadian Medical Association Journal 181, no. 12 (December 8, 2009): 933.

2.

Jeffrey M. Jones, “Same-Sex Marriage Support Solidifies above 50 Percent in U.S.,” Gallup Politics, May 13, 2013.

3.

Dave McNary, “Over One-third of Respondents Report ‘Disrespectful’ Treatment,” Variety, September 27, 2013.

4.

FreeDictionary.com: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/bias.

5.

Joseph LeDoux, The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998).

6.

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Graham_Sumner.

7.

Brett Pelham and Hart Blanton, Conducting Research in Psychology: Measuring the Weight of Smoke (Independence, KY: Cengage Learning, 2012).

8.

Daniel Casasanto and Kyle Jasmin, “Good and Bad in the Hands of Politicians: Spontaneous Gestures during Positive and Negative Speech,” PLoS ONE 5(7): e11805. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0011805 (2010), http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2F

journal.pone.0011805.

9.

David Brown, “Motor Vehicle Crashes: A Little-Known Risk to Returning Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan,” Washington Post, May 5, 2013.

10.

Amy J. C. Cuddy, Susan T. Fiske, and Peter Glick, “Warmth and Competence as Universal Dimensions of Social Perception: The Stereotype Content Model and the BIAS Map,” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 40 (2008): 61–149.

11.

Cuddy, Fiske, Glick, “Warmth and Competence as Universal Dimensions,” 65.

12.

Cuddy, Fiske, Glick, “Warmth and Competence as Universal Dimensions,” 65.

13.

Cuddy, Fiske, Glick, “Warmth and Competence as Universal Dimensions,” 71.

14.

Cuddy, Fiske, Glick, “Warmth and Competence as Universal Dimensions,” 72.

15.

Cuddy, Fiske, Glick, “Warmth and Competence as Universal Dimensions,” 73.

16.

Dan M. Kahan, Ellen Peters, Erica Cantrell Dawson, et al., “Motivated Numeracy and Enlightened Self-Government,” Social Science Research Network, September 3, 2013.

17.

Lindsay Abrams, “Study Proves That Politics and Math Are Incompatible,” Salon, September 5, 2013, http://www.salon.com/2013/09/05/study_proves_that_politics_and _math_are_incompatible/ (emphasis added).

18.

Marty Kaplan, “Scientists’ Depressing New Discovery about the Brain,” Salon, September 17, 2013, http://www.salon.com/2013/09/17/the_most_depressing_discovery_about_the _brain_ever_partner/.

19.

Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1994).

20.

Philip G. Dodgson and Joanne V. Wood, “Self-esteem and the Cognitive Accessibility of Strengths and Weaknesses after Failure,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 75, no. 1 (July 1998): 178–97.