Do Group Persons have Emotions – or Should They?

Szanto, Thomas

doi:10.1515/9783110450651-018

Cited by 12 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…But if one admits such cases, one might also wonder how collective or shared emotions might play a role here and, furthermore, whether there might be not just interpersonal and group-level but genuinely collective forms of ER-biases. Though this is still contentious and depend on a number of further assumptions about the possibility of collective agency and emotions, there is already a large body of literature in philosophy that may path the way to move ahead in this direction (e.g., Schmid, 2009 ; List and Pettit, 2011 ; von Scheve and Salmela, 2014 ; Szanto, 2015 , 2016 , 2017 ; Tollefsen, 2015 ; León et al, under review). Above and beyond the need to properly analyze these cases in and for themselves, I believe that in order to get clear about the exact sense in which sociality is modulating the affective and rational life of individuals, future research should analyze this whole variety of cases.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Szanto

2017

Front. Psychol.

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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.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%