Feelings Are Inherited, Logic Is Learned

Our feelings about most things are mostly inherited. Sometimes positively, sometimes negatively. It’s our upbringing and early life experiences. They give us all sorts of emotional baseline comparisons and nostalgias we’ll use for the rest of our lives.

Logic, on the other hand, is always taught. We have to learn systems to override or at least inform our gut intuitions. Whatever we feel gets filtered by logic, but only when we let it.

When it comes to making decisions, it should be no surprise we make most decisions with feelings and not logic. When we’re selling our goods and services, we can’t ever forget this detail. If logic gets applied at all, it’s mostly only after the fact to rationalize the emotional decision already reached.

No matter how smart, obvious, or clever our idea is, if it doesn’t generate an emotional “yes” response, no one will ever pick it up.

Thanks Rory Sutherland for the reminders. Check out his new book, Hacking the Unconscious, or these posts on his work. The psychological is always at least as important as the logical.