Why You Shouldn’t Trust Your Feelings

It can be very hard to detect just how much our judgement is constantly affected by our feelings. We should – at points – take care to be very sceptical of our first impulses.

It’s easy to grow up with a benign sense that our minds broadly offer us a reliable impression of ourselves, the people around us and the world at large. What we see, think and feel can be counted upon to amount to a more or less accurate picture of reality. We can call this optimistic thesis the ‘clear pane’ theory of the mind, implying that we are able to look out onto the world pretty much as if through an undistorted and blemish-free pane of glass…