Lily Ogawa ’28 (DCI Fellow)
Which one is the most persuasive to use in a deliberation: emotion or logic?
When asked this question, most people’s gut instinct would be to say logic. People tend to believe you more when you cite data and evidence to back up a claim rather than explaining using your emotion. It may also seem easier to engage in a conversation when the person talking is using logic as you would be able to support or refute their claims using logic. When using emotion, it may seem harder to disagree with another person as we don’t want to hurt their feelings.
On the other hand, deliberations without any emotion can ignore a major part of the topic. Emotion plays a crucial role in topics such as on the government’s management on the COVID-19 pandemic, which was one of our recent DCI D Team topics. Participants may have lost loved ones or have lost their businesses due to the pandemic. To say that these participants cannot share their emotions and must only use hard logic can make the deliberations feel out of touch with reality. Emotion humanizes these participants and their perspectives and adds a unique value to the deliberation that logic cannot bring.
With these thoughts in mind, the questions then become “how to balance between the two?” and “which one is more important?” Despite the popular belief that logic and emotion are polar opposites, Leonard Mlodinow, author of the book “Emotional: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking,” argues that they are interconnected. Emotion guides people to choose what sensory information to pay attention to and what data to consider when making a decision.
In other words, emotions shape how we think. Paul Dirac, considered “one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century,” encouraged us to “be guided above all, by your emotions” (Mlodinow). Even in the field of physics, emotion influences how we make assumptions or what path of mathematics we study (Mlodinow). Emotions can subconsciously affect how we think and absorb information.
In deliberations, emotions can play a vital role in showing the diverse perspectives of participants. While emotion should not dominate the deliberation, both emotion and logic are essential ingredients in having an effective deliberation. In my D Team meetings, participants often shared what they felt during the COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, and what they feel now. They also shared data or factual evidence they came across. In other words, they used both emotion and logic to have a sincere and meaningful deliberation. Perhaps there may not be a perfect formula to balance between emotion and logic, but both emotion and logic can play an important role in bringing about fruitful conversations on difficult topics.
Work Cited
McDermott-Murphy, Caitlin. “Logic or Emotion: Which Is More Valuable?” Harvard Gazette, 31 Jan. 2022, news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/01/logic-or-emotion-which-is-more-valuable/.
Mlodinow, Leonard. “Emotional: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking.” Next Big Idea Club, nextbigideaclub.com/magazine/emotional-feelings-shape-thinking-bookbite/31632/. Accessed 26 Mar. 2025.
