The First Key to Understanding People

There is one thing that if you understand, human behaviour will become more clear and you will be less surprised by it. You will be able to make more accurate predictions about how people will act and you will understand yourself better. And a fun result would be that you will understand fictional characters better because this is something every writer will know, at least intuitively, and successful characters are built upon this principle.

I grew up with the idea that something that separates us from the rest of animals is reason. While there is some truth to that, in the sense that we do have the capacity for complex reasoning, the truth is that reasoning is something that must be learned and slowly built over time, and even for the best of minds this skill is rarely used for decision making. It’s mostly a skill used for performing tasks outside of our personal life. I remember as a teenager how I was baffled to see in movies couples of very intelligent people, like university professors, fighting. How come such intelligent people can’t seem to resolve relatively simple day-to-day situations and fight and then fall apart as couples? I could not figure out what was happening.

You see, if you analyse your decision-making process, you may think that reason is the primary force behind it, but in reality, if you look a bit deeper, your decision is accompanied by an emotion, you must feel that that is the right decision. You may think that that feeling is the result of the reasoning process, you analysed, you found the best path, and now you feel that that is the right decision. That may be true in some cases, in those in which you deliberately made the effort to exclude emotion from the decision process. But how often do you do this? If you spend time and effort to train your logic and reason, probably very rarely. If you didn’t spend time doing this, then almost never.

Humans are not rational animals, we are emotional beings that more often than not use our newly found reasoning capacity for our emotional purposes, a process we call rationalising. Think of the last time you did something questionable and see what you feel about that. There’s a great chance that you used your reason to justify the action. And this usually happens because nobody likes the feeling of guilt and we want to avoid it, so we use our reason to make it go away.

Over 90% of our decisions happen at a subconscious level, on autopilot. The rest involve some conscious thinking, but even those are often the result of letting your emotions fight each other until one of them wins.

Now, that’s not a bad thing. Emotions are the fuel that gets us through life. It’s what makes us act. It’s what makes us human. But every action has a reaction, so this energy that moves us can also be used against us. It can be used by us, by sabotaging ourselves, or it can be used by others, by manipulating us. So it’s very important that you’re aware of this.

One of the first questions I got answers to after realising that humans are emotional beings was: how come we produce so much evil if the overwhelming majority of people are not evil?

And the answer is because most evil is not done by evil people, it’s done by normal people being emotionally hijacked. People who are scared, humiliated, desperate, angry, hurt, or just too tired. People who have found a way to justify something they would normally find unacceptable. Most of the evil in the world doesn’t come from cold-blooded villains, it comes from people trying to make themselves feel better. And because we are so good at rationalising, we can commit or support harmful actions while believing we are doing the right thing.

This is exactly why this principle is abused. Politicians know it. Advertisers know it. Media especially knows it. They don’t need to convince you with facts, they just need to trigger the right emotions. Fear, outrage, desire, pride, shame, pick one and you can move crowds. It’s not about truth; it’s about what feels true. And once something feels true, we’ll find the reasons to support it. That’s the danger.

That’s why awareness is key. If you don’t understand how your emotions drive your choices, someone else will. And they’ll use it to make you buy things you don’t need, support causes you don’t understand, and fight battles that were never yours to begin with.

So, if you want to understand people better, yourself included, start here: we are emotional first, rational second. That’s not a flaw. That’s just how we work. But you have to know it, or it will be used against you.