Today I want to challenge one stereotype that is widely spread throughout the world, and consists on the believe that people who think rationally or objectively have fewer feelings and emotions.
I will not only disprove this stereotype, but I will also explain why the reality is possibly the complete opposite.
But first, it’s important to clear up some definitions
What is objectivity
means a lack of bias, judgment, or prejudice | Source
An idea that accounting decisions should be made independently of biases and subjective methods and based instead on measurable assessments that can be supported by additional evidence. | Source
Being sentimental is defined as:
A sentimental person is strongly influenced by emotional feelings, especially about happy memories of past events or relationships with other people, rather than by careful thought and judgment based on facts. | Source
What is rationality
Mental state of a rational person characterized by beliefs that are coherent (not contradictory) and compatible with the person's experience within a given context. | Source
Rationality means the recognition and acceptance of reason as one's only source of knowledge, one's only judge of values and one's only guide to action. Quote from Ayn Rand. | Source
Now, back with the stereotype, it says that the common scientist is as a person sitting behind a desk, or at a blackboard, writing formulas and numbers, and rarely smiling with or laughing. Likewise, society sees him/her as someone withdrawn towards him/herself, who almost never interacts with anybody, like sort of an autistic person, and who would not cry even at a baby’s funeral.
Obviously those who think like this have never been to a university and partied with these people. They are as crazy as any other person in the world.
On the other side of the stereotype we have the "sentimental" people, which usually are associated with bohemians and free spirits. These people are shown as having a high interest in others, in nature, in feelings, and tears are part of their day to day life.
However, I know many of these people who, if you didn’t hear them speak, you would think they belonged to the first group of scientist. People who are withdrawn and who do not socialize with anyone, and who would not shed a tear no matter what.
In the end, these are simple stereotypes, and I am sure that almost everyone who is reading this has friends of both types and can confirm everything I am saying.
What are stereotypes
Stereotypes are characteristics imposed upon groups of people because of their race, nationality, and sexual orientation, among others. But these characteristics tend to be oversimplifications of the groups involved. | Source
But what is it that really cause us feel, in the traditional "sentimental" way? In my opinion, the fact of one understanding and being able to relate to the feeling of the other person. The empathy. And that has many cultural factors. For example, things that can be funny in a culture might not be funny on a different culture. Likewise, things that are normal for some people may be repugnant to others.
What is empathy
Empathy is the experience of understanding another person's condition from their perspective. You place yourself in their shoes and feel what they are feeling. Empathy is known to increase prosocial (helping) behaviors. | Source
Empathy is, at its simplest, awareness of the feelings and emotions of other people. | Source
Another way of saying this is that the more you understand why another person suffers, or smiles, the more sentimental you get. For example, if a film of someone who was extremely poor and went through great difficulty, and in the end this person finds success, one might cry for that person, because we understand the meaning for that person to be able to finally achieve success. That is, in our minds we might unconsciously imagine what it would feel like to come from such a difficult position and with a lot of effort ending up reaching the top. We put ourselves in the shoes of that other person thanks to our understanding and knowledge of the circumstances.
Where I am going with this way of thinking is to the conclusion that the more you understand something, the more you appreciate it.
And no social group understands more things about us humans, than rational people.
Let’s choose for example a sad situation like a funeral. For a person who is not very rational, a death although it is somewhat painful, might be taken as something "to be happy", because "the deceased will go to a better place". Obviously if he/she is a close relative, this person will naturally suffer a lot (like almost all the rest of humanity), cry, and spend a few days in pain.
However, in my opinion someone like a scientist who studies life, and understands in depth how fragile it really is, and how difficult to find it is in our corner of the Universe, and that he/she feels extremely lucky to feel alive and to be here, experiencing all of this wonderful thing that is life, and knowing that perhaps after death there is nothing; will then value life much more than someone who believes that "there are no problems, when I die it is just the beginning of another life."
That is, it is a matter of perception. Highly rational people, although perhaps they can not deny the possibility of a life beyond death, do not take it as given, and therefore live their lives probably appreciating every moment of joy, they live a life embracing each second making each day worthwhile.
I'm not saying that you must be rational in order to appreciate life, what I'm saying is that regardless of the background, a rational person who really understands things, should by pure deduction appreciate life more intensely, and feel more emotional towards it, than another person who does not have that understanding of things. Because of this reason, it’s fair to say a rational person can put him/herself in the shoes of another more easily than one who is not rational.
There are many examples that support this. We can name both composers Mozart and Beethoven, 2 highly rational people in the world of music, and yet the feeling of their compositions goes far beyond anything written by thousands of other more "sentimental" composers, these 2 historic composers meticulously analyzed the human state, understood that makes a person happy or sad, and with that rational knowledge they wrote some of the most emotionally powerful works that humanity has ever heard.
With art we have the greatest example of Leonardo DaVinci, who in works such as The Last Supper or Mona Lisa used all his rational knowledge about different techniques to make proper paintings, and ended up creating two of the most memorable works of art in the history of humanity.
And whole books can be filled with famous people who with their works in several activities, make their rationality the source of many of our stronger emotions in life.
Having said this, we should therefore leave this stereotype behind, because as we can see, it is more possible that rational people might as well be the most sentimental humans on Earth.
Do you think after reading this, that rational people can be highly sentimental?
Do you believe in some stereotypes? If so, in which ones do you believe?
References
vocabulary - objectivity
businessdictionary - objectivity
dictionary.cambridge - sentimental
businessdictionary - rationality
importanceofphilosophy - rationality
thoughtco - stereotypes
psychologytoday – empathy
skillsyouneed - empathy
Image sources
All images are from pixabay
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Hello, I was just passing by and took the boldness to comment, I hope not to disturb.
I know what you are saying, being a "rational person", I´ve been involved in many unpleasant situations due to this type of logic or prejudices throughout my life, even tho I´m a musician and a poet, with several "highly sentimental" creations, some people seems to believe that I just can´t understand their feelings, just for not adopting the same attitude or not seeing things in the same way.
It´s not rare having people accusing me of not having feelings or about not understanding them, just for not acting as they expect me to act, with anger or tears for example.
But yes, I also feel and yes, I understand them and yes, It makes me feel a little bad that they think that way about me, but, that's the way the world is and, what can we do, right?
Thanks for sharing this post, it´s good to read opinions like this from time to time, regards.
Excellent comment @kex , its probably my favorite!
The thing with emotions or feelings is that every person experience them in their unique way, and when it's time to express them, every person does it differently, and yes, there might be situations in which another person doesn't understand why we react the way we do. But that's ok, no problem with that, as you said "that's the way the world is and, what can we do, right?" .
Cheers mate!
Well, we can write more posts like this and make them think a little more.
That's why i thanked you.
I'm glad you liked my comment bro, cheers!
I loved this. I'm extremely emotional most of the times, and I'm a rational person too. The biggest problem I find most of the time is that because I want to understand my very intense emotions, I get frustrated. There is not much to understand in emotion and they aren't always rational, and that is a very hard concept to grasp sometimes, when you are also extremely emotional and you just DON'T KNOW why you are feeling the way you are feeling, and with that kind of intensity. In the end, I think that, as a human being, it is great to be rational, and it is great to be able to feel with intensity. But if you try to understand emotions, or you get emotional about being rational (it happens) you are just missing the point. Being human is tough some times.
I think you sum it up perfectly with your last phrase:
There can be occasions in which the intensity of what we feel and the complexity of our thoughts might be too much, which can cause us frustration, but either way, in the end, its up to us how we read into things and how we react based on that
I completely agree - honestly I think it's because I feel SO STRONGLY that I end up being more rational in a feeble attempt to keep my feelings under control, lol!
But seriously, feelings help with rationality and reason. Being rational requires it - if you can't have empathy and understand where humans are also feeling things then you can't get a full enough picture of the concept or task at hand to BE rational in the first place!
@dedicatedguy, I feel that the definition of rational is the key to this post.
Seems like a person can be emotionally rational, intellectually rational, and/or spiritually rational.
Thanks for helping me think more about this!
If you want to discuss more about this just let me know :)
I think this kind of links back to your article on reasoning. The whole right brain left brain.
Like when we think of logical brain, it's all about getting the job done, its about rationality. Without some action in the right brain, I think emotion is harder to come by.
The reason I say this is because I witnessed it in my own life. For the first 20-25 years of my life I was really unemotional, I could be happy, but I couldn't express sadness, grief, anger, or any "negative" emotions in a healthy way. I feel like I had shut off some part of myself to the point where I couldn't feel.
Addressing things as they come up has helped me get past this and open up to feeling more. So I think that if we get to the point where we shut off our emotions, or rather shut them out, we can start to fit that stereotype and start focusing only on work or school or something that doesn't require much emotion.
I do feel that certain jobs will lend to one side or another. Like most artists seem like they are open to emotion because you can see it in their work. In the same way you can see that in a creative and innovative scientist, you just don't expect to because there are more rules and guidelines in creating a study.
Sorry if I rambled! haha nice write-up
I agree, depending on the daily activities we do, we will tend to develop certain aspects of ourselves and certain ways of thinking over others. Nevertheless, this doesn't mean a profession determines the personality of a person.
What you tell me about the incapacity to express negative feelings is more common that one could think, negative feelings are mostly about vulnerability, and sometimes we for the most part don't want to look or much less, be vulnerable, so what do we do? we block the things that make us feel like that. The negatives feelings you mentioned like
are hard to express if we are not with people we truly trust.
Interesting topic, about rationality and feeling, truly they are not mutually exclusive, speaking about your example of the funeral scenario.
most scientists who are extremely rational people are actually religious people but they've been able to turn off their religious mindset when facing real facts in the lab.
Human psyche is much more complicated, our belief systems constantly clash with one another, we mostly try to resolve them through cognitive dissonance of varying degrees.
I don’t know if those scientists are actually religious people.
Of our believe systems clash, then that means at least one of those systems is wrong. I believe the truth doesn’t clash with truth, so if there is a clash, there must be a lie, or a mistake.
I teach people how to understand and work with their emotions, and part of that process is understanding how we need to learn to integrate our whole selves to live our best lives. This means our rational mind, our emotional self, our physical bodies, and our spirits. So yes, I agree with a lot of what you've said here!
I would like to understand how we could integrate our rational minds with our spirit. That sounds hard to achieve don’t you think?
Well, we would need to start with our own definitions so we knew we were talking about the same things. In the framework I'm talking about, spirit could mean a soul (if you are religious, etc) or even just a visionary self - something that sees the big picture and aspires to broad minded. As far as integration, I think of it as a "whole is more than sum of parts" type of thing. A bone is very different than a heart, yet they are both integrated into a whole body, for example. You're not meshing the bone with the heart, just as you're not meshing spirit with rationality, but you're holding them both (and the other two - emotions and body) all as equal and valid parts of your whole self. The integration isn't to each other, but to a whole meta-self that arises when you allow the wisdom of each part of your self to show up and inform your life. Does that make sense?
I see, you are talking about developing several aspects, even though if they are different. That could work for some people I believe.
But I am not sure about a 100% rational mind wanting to be involved in spiritual subjects haha.
Still, it is an interesting take.
Fair enough!
It's a challenge. I see your point that highly rational individuals can have a complexity of feeling and emotion that might not be apparent at first. I do have to say though that, whether it's by conditioning or nature, that I definitely do not experience emotions as strongly as other people. It's something that I'm working on, but also I wonder if I'm just wired that way.
People always develop differently, and not everyone will be equally good in expressing or even experiencing feelings or emotions.