Weird! Strong Emotions Make Us Feel Unbiased

If you’re human, you can’t help but have subjective biases. No one is strictly objective. How could we be? We each have our history, culture, and, above all, our individual emotions and hopes. Who could reasonably claim to be neutral, unbiased, and objective?

Actually, anyone, because that’s how we feel. Feelings are overwhelmingly convincing. When we feel strongly, it doesn’t feel like feeling. It feels like the truth revealed.

That’s the paradox of subjectivity. Subjectively, we feel objective, as if what we see is what there is. This sense of intuitive objectivity comes intuitively to us all. We feel like exceptional realists who tell it like it is. We may claim to be humbler and more self-doubting than that, but when we feel strongly about something, our guts tend to take over, convincing us that they aren’t taking over. We passionately, fervently feel like we see reality with calm clarity.

How can I make such a bold, sweeping claim about us? Perhaps because I feel strongly about it. You might want to call me on that. “Calm down. You’re getting emotional. Your bias is showing.”

Good. Now, think about how you’d respond if someone said that to you. You probably wouldn’t say, “You know you’re right. I’m biased. Thank you for your objective observation.” Rather, you’d find it a pretty aggressive comment.

That’s why I make this bold sweeping claim. Because accusing people of emotional bias is widely regarded as a threatening move. It escalates arguments. When we start accusing each other of bias, we tend to get more emotional while insisting that we’re not getting emotional and just stating objective truth.

We intuit that we see reality objectively, and when we encounter someone with a different sense of reality, it takes hard work to relax into mutual curiosity. We tend instead to think there’s something wrong with them, as if anyone who sees things differently is biased. Indeed, as if their bias proves that we’re unbiased. Our subjective emotions motivate us to start pulling rank as if we see clearly and they don’t.

It’s interesting that we don’t have a word for our subjective impression of ourselves as objective. I’ll call it objectivizing. Like rationalizing, it suggests a contrivance. Our intense subjective biases compel us to objectivize.

Objectivizing tends to increase as arguments heat up. As emotions escalate, we tend to start pulling objective rank.

The more prolonged the argument, the more we tend to escalate into what’s called frame dominance, as though only our frame matters because ours is the “realistic frame.” We reach for the judge’s chair to preside over an argument in which we’re merely advocates. We start blowing our referee whistle at our opponent, calling “foul” as though we’re competing in the game but overseeing it.

Objectivizing drives all claims to what’s called “revelation,” which for most of human history was considered the source of truth about reality. Revelation is an emotion-driven sense that the truth has been suddenly revealed to us.

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