Imagine hearing that someone is drowning. If you don’t see them, hear their cries, or feel their desperation, chances are your emotions stay dormant. This is the difference between vividness and vagueness—the vivid image grips us, the vague one passes quietly without demanding action.
Vagueness blurs urgency. Looking at Earth from space, you see glorious oceans and continents but miss the smog, traffic jams, and conflicts. From such distance, the world seems peaceful, and the motivation to act fades away. Our emotional machinery is designed to respond to direct, tangible suffering, not abstract statistics. Yet when emotions are awakened by a human face and a story, we can display extraordinary compassion—far beyond what pure rationality would predict.
Why Our Compassion Has Limits
The sobering truth is that we’re not wired to feel deeply about large-scale, distant problems involving people we’ve never met. This bias leads us to act for the “child trapped in a well” but struggle to respond to crises that affect millions. Knowing this, we can strive to make more informed, balanced decisions—ones that consider both the vivid and the vague.
Interestingly, emotions rarely leave a lasting trace in our memory. A driver cuts you off, you get angry, and minutes later, your thoughts drift back to the music playing. Temporary emotions fade, but when we make decisions in the heat of those emotions, the effects can linger. A single mood-driven choice can echo far into the future.
When Emotions Hijack Long-Term Decisions
This phenomenon is especially troubling when decisions remain “hostage” to emotions long after the feeling itself disappears. Happy or annoyed, people often misattribute their emotions to unrelated offers or scenarios, leading to irrational acceptance or rejection. This is not limited to isolated incidents—it becomes ingrained through self-herding.
Self-herding comes in two forms:
- Exact repetition: We simply repeat the past action in identical situations (“I brought wine last time, so I’ll bring it again”).
- Character-based inference: We reinterpret past actions as part of our identity (“I gave money to a beggar, so I must be caring; I’ll start volunteering”).
Either way, emotions set a precedent, and that precedent can influence future choices—sometimes with no rational basis.
If we can pause and let an emotion pass without acting, neither short-term regret nor long-term consequences follow. But if we react impulsively, we risk building ongoing patterns shaped by momentary feelings.
Emotional Patterns in Relationships
Couples offer a clear example. In arguments about money or chores, irrelevant emotions—stress from work, irritation from traffic—can seep into discussions. These emotional influences don’t just alter the current conversation; they mold long-term communication patterns. A behavioral repertoire forms, dictating future interactions.
Interestingly, gatherings outside the home or in socially structured settings tend to have fewer arguments—not necessarily due to politeness, but because these environments lack the emotionally charged habits of daily life. Before committing to marriage or a deep partnership, it’s worth exploring interactions in unstructured settings, where habitual patterns have room to surface. And it’s critical to spot early-warning signs of destructive habits before they calcify.
Rationality, Biases, and the Weight of Change
We love to think of ourselves as rational beings, basing decisions on logic. But biases such as the endowment effect (overvaluing what we already have) and loss aversion (seeing giving something up as painful) combine with the status quo bias (preferring things to stay as they are) to make change difficult.
Irreversible decisions feel especially intimidating. Buying a home, choosing a career—these choices carry weight because they close doors. If the decision were truly eternal, the fear would be overwhelming. Still, even without permanence, the human tendency is to cling to what’s familiar and resist altering the life we’ve built.
The Path Forward
If we can recognize how emotions creep into decision-making—often without relevance—we stand a better chance of resisting impulsive choices. By cultivating awareness of our compassion biases, and by designing decision-making processes that aren’t swayed by fleeting moods, we can build a more stable foundation for both personal and collective action.
When the noise of the moment fades, intelligent choices survive. The challenge is ensuring we make them before the emotions, vivid or vague, mislead us.
Source – The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home by Dan Ariely
Goodreads – https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7815744-the-upside-of-irrationality
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Thinking Beyond Science 
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