Passions Within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions

I bought a used book and the condition wasn't bad at all. Love the bargain. A book worth reading if you want to understand the juxtaposition between emotions and reason. It does change your mind but given the state of our knowledge today, there are some claims in the book that are not as relevant. Still, the key insights make this a wonderful book!

I too first saw this book mentioned in some of Dan Dennett's writings. I'm blown away by the analysis of how emotions work, what they do and why they might be evolutionarily adaptive presented here. I'm very glad I read this. I'm definitely going to skim and reread this one periodically, what Robert Frank writes here needs to be fully internalized.

Great book

This is Robert Frank's best book. As is true of everything he writes, Frank's style here is clear and engaging.He aims to show that human emotions are created by natural selection to increase the individual's chances of survival. What appear to be a person's irrational reactions and inclinations often promote mutually beneficial trade and, thus, promote that person's long-run welfare. The explanation of how emotions achieve this remarkably beneficial outcome is the core of this fine book.Of all the many serious books that I've read over the years, this one is surely among the most fun! It's fantastic reading.

The sheer volume of literature devoted to understanding behavior in humans and animals underscores how tricky understanding behavior is. A fraction of this literature, including this book, devotes particular attention to the problems that humans and animals encounter within social and natural environments. With a grasp of the important problems people encounter, a new perspective arises that identifies behavior as stragegic, attempted and on average efficient solutions to specific problems.But these problems though hinted at here and there are rarely understood well by even the elite of the academic world let alone found within the common knowledge. Arguably among the more important problems that shape behavior are the freerider problem, the prisoner's dilemma, the problem of mutually offsetting investments, the problem of uncertainty, and the commitment problem. Robert Frank is perhaps the commitment problem's best spokesperson.Often a person or an animal must convince a mate, an rival, or a predator that one is committed to taking a course of action that will require a substantial investment and perhaps substantial risk. If the commitment has convincing force, often the investment and risk will not be necessary. So the best course of action in a situation can seem highly counterintuitive. Behavior that might seem irrational or crazy can actually be the most efficient resolution to a competitive or cooperative circumstance. The commitment problem arises because in order to take advantage of these efficiencies, one must convince others that one is not bluffing and is actually fully committed. Robert Frank explores these situations including the cooperative enterprise of marriage and other social relationships. The explanatory power is impressive.Frank argues that emotions in general are essentially technologies designed to solve the commitment problem. Emotions convey to others that one is committed to certain perspectives or courses of action. The significance of this insight cannot be overstated. Those who are privy to evolutionary psychology and the evolutionary perspective will appreciate how this theory of emotions fits into the paradigm of selective pressures and adaptive behavior. This book can be read right along with Darwin's "The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals."Why is the commitment problem an important idea? One reason is that many philosophies, including Objectivism, treat emotions as the polar opposite of logic and rationality. The commitment problem underscores the logic behind emotions.As an aside, Frank is the perfect explanation of why some economists are among the brightest social scientists. The economic perspective includes the idea that rationality is strategic and that in order to make the most efficient choice, often problems are encountered that require tradeoffs. So, economists are among the first to discover or elaborate on specific and pervasive problems that people and other organisms encounter.Lastly, to argue that emotions are strategic is not to say that the strategy is conscious. As the emotional animals illustrate, the strategy of emotions can be carried out by instinct. Cases where the emotional strategy leads to sub-optimal results doesn't contradict the theory either. The proliferation of emotional animals illustrates this as well.I challenge that anyone who studies the emotions is in the dark ages without understanding the ideas in this book. From my experience, many PhD trained social scientists and educators don't have a good grasp of this material.

I read this book as an undergrad at Rutgers, courtesy of another fine author, Prof. Lionel Tiger, and have been grappling with these ideas ever since. Humans DO often act rationally, but our cerebral functions evolved relatively recently and rely on our sub-cortical structures and function. The brain overlaps in structure and function on levels. Rational thought and emotional decisions too overlap. Any theory which fails to account for this evolutionary fact is significantly incomplete. Robert Trivers' work on reciprocal altruism fundamental... Damasio's "Descartes' Error" fascinating as well... Jaak Panksepp's work on brain evolution... he argues that emotions evolved to help match decisions to the correct environment. It can be as simple as fight-flight, or as complex - and social - as guilt to reinforce trust in social situations. Great book.

Robert H. Frank is a genius!

To an economist who believes that human beings are rational agents always seeking to act in their own self-interest, the responder in an ultimatum bargaining game ought to accept any offer made by the proposer, however derisory (one percent is better than nothing). To the rest of us, who have a sense of fairness, who know that self-interest does not rule our lives down to the last penny, who suspect that impassioned actions might sometimes actually be a very good thing and who would reject an insulting offer out of hand - how else can we explain our behaviour? In this marvellous book, Robert H. Frank flips the widely held belief that our passions are always something we would do better to control, and shows just how our emotions can sometimes modify rational behaviour in a good way. His claim "is that passions often serve our interests very well indeed" and he argues persuasively that the roots of altruistic behaviour are emotional rather than cognitive.Throughout, Frank uses "rational" to mean "self-interested" when describing our behaviour. For example, it is irrational to get angry over a minor theft and lose a day's pay to see justice done, since in all likelihood the cost of recovering the property and punishing the thief will be out of all proportion to the value of the item stolen. However, if the thief suspects that you're the sort of person who is predisposed to respond irrationally and emotionally and is not guided solely by material self-interest, then he is more likely to leave you alone.For most of us, our commitment to justice will probably not be tested too frequently. More likely to get an airing will be "strong emotional commitments to norms of fairness" (which are why purely selfish people do badly when striking a bargain) and we're all familiar with the importance of trustworthiness in the realm of personal relationships ("where egoists fare poorly"). Frank's "claim is not that self-interest is an unimportant human motive, but that material forces allow room, apparently a great deal of room, for more noble motives as well".Commitment is a key word throughout the book. Commitment problems arise "when it is in a person's interest to make a binding commitment to behave in a way that will later seem contrary to self-interest". Consider the example of two people who go into business together. Opportunities will arise for each to cheat the other and escape detection (the rational course of action), and yet the venture would be more successful if neither cheated. How do they make a binding commitment and so solve the commitment problem? What is needed are incentives to keep promises or "commitment devices" and Frank claims that specific emotions such as guilt, anger, envy and even love are better placed than rational calculation to fulfil this role. Our feelings "commit" us to act against our narrow interests.The commitment model is shorthand for the notion that seemingly irrational behaviour "is sometimes explained by emotional predispositions that help solve commitment problems" and it suggests that the moving force behind moral behaviour "lies not in rational analysis but in emotions". In a social species the ability to make credible commitments (in contrast to credible arguments) is crucial and "confers genuine advantages": the clear irony is that a single-minded pursuit of self-interest is in the long run likely to prove costly.We know that the world is an uneasy mix of more altruistic and less altruistic persons, of those who will cheat if they can get away with it (witness the rioters who became looters earlier this year in many parts of the country) and those who resist such opportunities. Can we identify unopportunistic persons? Certainly not infallibly, but our intuition that we can is supported by the prisoner's dilemma experiment discussed by Frank. Indeed, that we can do so is "the central premise upon which the the commitment model is based". From this premise, it logically follows that unopportunistic behaviour "will emerge and survive even in a ruthlessly competitive material world".The commitment model has an impressive intellectual pedigree, its message "in close accord with what eighteenth-century moral philosophers had to say about the motives for moral action". Frank cites David Hume, who "believed that morality was based on sentiment, not logic, and that the most important sentiment was sympathy", and Adam Smith, for whom sympathy played an important role. He provides a fascinating historical sketch showing how such ideas fell out of favour, and how they are now proving very useful in explaining human behaviour. Frank himself has written extensively on these issues over a long career (his latest book,  The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good , contrasts the interests of individuals versus groups); scientists like Joseph LeDoux ( The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life ) and Antonio Damasio ( Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain ) have rehabilitated the emotions as essential to how our minds work; and Daniel Kahneman ( Thinking, Fast and Slow ) shows among many other things how momentary emotions are critical in the famous mugs experiment, the standard demonstration of the endowment effect.There is nothing mystical about the emotions that drive our behaviours: "they are an obvious part of most people's psychological makeup". Robert Frank's impressive achievement in this book is - using well-reasoned arguments - to put them back into that most soulless of subjects, economics, which has for too long laboured under mistaken and misguided notions about human nature. And for those of us concerned over how to agree on a society's norms in the absence of religion, that the "role of material rewards in the commitment model is logically equivalent to religion's threat of damnation" is an extremely valuable piece of the jigsaw. The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common GoodThe Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional LifeDescartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human BrainThinking, Fast and Slow

Loved the book! It really was very inspiring and stimulating. I feel the book gives a very comprehensive insight into how to interpret passions under a light game theoretic approach.

Très bien