Collaborative Irrationality, Akrasia, and Groupthink: Social Disruptions of Emotion Regulation

Abstract

The present paper proposes an integrative account of social forms of practical irrationality and corresponding disruptions of individual and group-level emotion regulation (ER). I will especially focus on disruptions in ER by means of collaborative agential and doxastic akrasia. I begin by distinguishing mutual, communal and collaborative forms of akrasia. Such a taxonomy seems all the more needed as, rather surprisingly, in the face of huge philosophical interest in analysing the possibility, structure, and mechanisms of individual practical irrationality, with very little exception, there are no comparable accounts of social and collaborative cases. However, I believe that, if it is true that individual akrasia is, in the long run, harmful for those who entertain it, this is even more so in social contexts. I will illustrate this point by drawing on various small group settings, and explore a number of socio-psychological mechanisms underlying collaborative irrationality, in particular groupthink. Specifically, I suggest that in collaborative cases there is what I call a spiraling of practical irrationality at play. I will argue that this is typically correlated and indeed partly due to biases in individual members’ affect control and eventually the group’s with whom the members identify.

Extended emotions

“…And this, in turn, is often due precisely to their disruptive role on co‐regulatory practices (misidentification of one's own or one's group's shared emotions, biases on one's own or a group's affect control, etc. ; see Szanto, forthcoming‐b). Here, placing ExE in dialogue with political philosophy, social choice and game theory, and recent sociology of emotions is likely to generate genuinely new insights and open up new areas for further research…”

“…For the latter task, one might go beyond ExM and ExE debates and look into the growing body of work in social ontology and social cognition research. Here, we find resources to clarify the sense in which collective emotions involve a single, token‐identical phenomenal subject of those emotions, that is, some identification or fusion of emotional episodes of individuals—or, rather, the maintenance of a self/other‐differentiation (Huebner, ; Helm, , ; Salmela, , ; Schmid, ; Szanto, ; Zahavi, a, 2015b; Salmela & Nagatsu, ; Szanto, forthcoming‐a; Szanto, forthcoming‐b; León, Szanto, and Zahavi, forthcoming). Indeed, one of the central assumptions underlying skepticism regarding collective extensions of emotions is that either there is some ineffable phenomenal core to emotional experiences that is “non‐transferable” from one subject to another or else that they must fuse into one token‐identical emotional episode.…”

Emotional Self-Alienation

“…The issue in ESA is not that subjects feel by some heteronomous powers coerced to have certain emotions—be these coercive powers internalized, but heteronomous desires, akratic behavior or doxastic akrasia (cf. Szanto ), or some external triggers, and so on. If this were at issue, the distinctive experiential characteristic of the phenomenon would simply disappear.…”

“…Now, there may be many, if only irrational, reasons or a‐rational motivations for such forms of irrationality, including emotional or affective biases (cf. Mele ; Szanto ). We have some deficient self‐relation involved here, and it is also true that often this deficiency results in ESA.…”

“…In regulating emotions, we are “influencing which emotions one has, when one has them, and how one experiences and expresses these emotions” (Gross , 271). For example we select and adjust the situations of affective import and modulate our attention or behavioral responses (Szanto ). In alienating emotion management, ordinary regulatory processes, however, take prevalence over any other dimension of emotions, and in particular their affective‐intentional one.…”