If you haven’t heard about the Will Smith – Chris Rock incident at the Oscars, you are incredibly focused, and I commend you! This post is not about judging who was right and where to draw the line etc.
Let us look at the episode from the perspective of emotion vs reason. Some are of the view that Will Smith acted emotionally and, in such moments, anyone of us might have done the same. We all react ‘emotionally’ to events when we feel strong emotions like anger, fear or even love, pride etc.
We like to categorize experiences, events, and belief systems in two opposite buckets. Happy-Sad, Capitalist-Communist, Physical-Mental, it allows us to operate in our world, without having to over think. The duality of Emotion v Reason is widely accepted, and it feels right intuitively. Recent research has upended this idea though. Scientists like Lisa Feldman Barrett have demonstrated that the division between emotion and reason is imagined not real. How we respond depends on how we see the situation based on experience, culture, and other nuances of the intra and interpersonal landscape. Would Will Smith have reacted violently if the other individual was a powerful political or business figure? Maybe, maybe not. But you can see how there is reason even in emotion. When we decide to hold back instead of responding to a senior colleague’s unkind remarks in a meeting, are we being emotional or rational? Would we react differently if the comments came from a peer who we are not close to? If it was just emotion at play, our response wouldn’t vary, and we know it can.
But does it matter beyond the semantics? Call it emotion, reason, or a combination of the two, what difference does it make? Poor behavior is sometimes explained as an emotional response, like the outburst of a team member in office. You might even notice a difference in how an action is seen, depending on the gender of the person involved. An emotionally charged man is a driven achiever, a woman acting the same way, is out of control 😊Society believes in this so deeply that even a criminal act is sometimes classified as ‘crime of passion’. We use emotion as an argument to justify a lot, and that is the slippery slope that it is.
Oversimplifying an action as either emotional or rational, misses the bigger canvas of human decisions and social dynamics. Behavior must not be explained away as emotional or rational. What happens to us is not our fault, but how we respond is always our responsibility. Doesn’t matter if you are the average Joe or the Fresh Prince of Bel Air.
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