Dynamics of Rationality and Dynamics of Emotions

Abstract

From a dynamical perspective, rationality implies to revise our beliefs if necessary. Understanding emotions needs to analyze the interaction between our internal dynamics and the dynamics of our environment. The combination of these two dynamical perspectives leads to take into account the impact of emotions in our decisions and the relations between emotions and revision. The different effects of two kinds of anticipating emotions (representational and driving ones) can explain biases of temporal discounting. Comparative and mixed emotions can explain biases in our choices under uncertainty. But recurrent emotions (in the long term) can also be incentives to revise reasonably our order of preferences—the preferences that resist this revision are our more stable values. As different processes of revision are possible, leading to different ways of merging different kinds of order, this raises the problem of how to choose between different orders. Emotional dynamics can lead to shift from one kind of order to another and to learn what is the more reasonable order. But emotional learning is path dependent and takes time to experience the different orders and reach stability.