The crux of your argument seems to be that "borrowing" motivation from leaders and peers can help your goals. Unfortunately there's a flipside: leaders and peers often try to motivate you for their goals, not your goals. So instead of becoming more sensitive to other people's emotional appeals, you could try getting more in touch with your own values, increasing their emotional appeal to you while still blocking out everyone else.
you could try getting more in touch with your own values, increasing their emotional appeal to you while still blocking out everyone else.
I would like to increase the emotional appeal of my values, yes. In fact, being better at this is the ultimate goal of this post.
But becoming more motivated by my values is not a simple process. (Is it simple for you? How do you do it?)
There are lots of tricks that can help do this, already described around Less Wrong. I'm suggesting another.
I suspect that selectively allowing emotional appeals to move you is a powerf...
In a comment elsewhere, BrandonReinhart asked:
I suspect that we percieve a dichotomy between emotional appeal and a well-reasoned, well-evidenced argument.
I have a just-so story for why our kind can't cooperate: We've learned to distrust emotional appeal. This is understandable: the strength of an emotional appeal to believe X and do Y doesn't correlate with the truth of X or the consequences of Y. In fact, we are surrounded by emotional appeals to believe nonsense and do useless things. The production and delivery of emotional appeal is politics, policy, and several major industries. So, in our environment, emotional appeal is a strong indicator against rational argument.
In order to defend against irrationality, I have a habit of shutting out emotional appeals. I tune out emotive religious talk. I remain carefully aloof from political speeches. I put emotional distance between myself and any enthusiastic crowd. In general, my immediate response to emotional appeal is to ignore the message it bears. It's automatic now, subverbal -- I have an aversion to naked emotional appeal.
I strongly suspect that I'm not only describing myself, but many of you as well. (Is this true? This is a testable hypothesis.)
If we largely manage to broadly ignore emotional appeal, then we shut out not only harmful manipulations, but worthwhile rallying cries. We are motivated only by the motivation we can muster ourselves, rather than what motivation we can borrow from our peers and leaders. This may go some way towards explaining not just why Our Kind Can't Cooperate, but why we seem to so often report that Our Kind Can't Get Much Done.
On the other hand, if this is a real problem, it suggests a solution. We could try to learn an alternative response to emotional appeal. Upon noticing near-mode emotional appeal, instead of rejecting the message outright, go to far mode and consider the evidence. If the argument is sound under careful, critical consideration, and you approve of its motivation, then allow the emotional appeal to move you. On the other hand, I don't know if this is psychologically realistic.
So, questions:
I hypothesize that we are much more averse to emotional appeals than the normal population. Does this stike you as true? Do you have examples or counterexamples?
How might we test this hypothesis?
I further hypothesize that, if we are averse to emotional appeals, that this is a strong factor in both our widely-reported akrasia and our sometimes-noted inability to work well together. How could we test this hypothesis?
Can you postpone being moved by an emotional appeal until after making a calm decision about it?
Can you somehow otherwise filter for emotional appeals that are highly likely to have positive effects?