Psychologyspeaking topic
Emotional reasoning: 'I feel awful, so things must be awful.' Can a feeling ever count as evidence about reality?
— Beck, cognitive distortions (emotional reasoning)
practice with this topic
Set the timer (5-30 min), take 20 seconds of prep if you like, start talking. Jot your thoughts onto the sticky-note board.
similar topics
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- The Ellsberg paradox: people prefer a risk with known odds to an ambiguity with unknown ones; a familiar bad beats an unfamiliar maybe. Why do we cling to a known misery over an unknown hope?
- Regression: falling back into childish behavior under stress. Why does a grown adult sulk or go silent the moment things get hard?
- Bilingual children don't mix their two languages; they learn astonishingly early which language belongs to which person, speaking one with their mother and the other with their father. Even a one-year-old switches languages based on the face in front of them. How does a mind that small route languages to people so cleanly?
- Affective forecasting: we constantly overestimate how happy or miserable something will make us, then adapt to it with startling speed. So how much should we trust decisions built on 'this will make me happy'?