As human beings, we have an innate need to know, to understand our world, and to create meaning in our life. Our need to know can motivate our personal growth and intellectual development. We are continually evaluating our thoughts, feelings, and the world around us. This striving to appraise situations is due to a psychobiological, motivation system for making evaluations. When this motivation-to-know has been adequately developed, it facilitates our ability to make choices that satisfy our needs, desires, and goals. However, this motivation-to-know can also drive us to become rigid or obsessive. By understanding the nature of our motivation-to-know, we can develop that capacity and flourish.
Topics Below:
Evaluation Motivation
Evaluation and Meaning
Evaluation Emotions
Evaluation-Motivation
Adaptive engagement in the world requires being able to make appropriate evaluations. Our actions in the world are not simply fueled by our basic needs seeking satiation, but are guided by our active evaluations. Human beings are innately evaluative creatures because being able to appropriately evaluate life events has profound evolutionary advantages. Our drive to evaluate life events is experienced as striving to understand our world, and to create a meaning for our life.
This evaluative process is not a simple attribution of pleasant or unpleasant; rather, we make evaluations in our life through complex, appraisal heuristics based on our predispositions, reflecting our self-image and worldview. The evaluation process integrates our emotions and cognition with our memory, in order to make decisions about how to act, think, and feel. As is true for our basic needs and desires, the evaluation process is interwoven into a complex motivational system. The motivation-to-know is experienced as powerful striving to understand the value or meaning of an event.
When misdirected, this motivation-to-know can fuel injurious behavior. For instance, when we mistake our need to understand with our need for self-soothing, we can become obsessive and ruminative in the misguided hope that understanding will remove our distress. For example, after a relationship break-up, we may experience a deep longing to understand why the relationship ended, perhaps saying to ourself: “If only I knew what to make of it, I could put it to rest and feel better.” Obsessing can also arise if we confuse avoiding risk or injury with our need for understanding. In this case, we might find ourselves endlessly ruminating over all possible contingencies. Here we might actually be mistaking understanding the situation with our need for reassurance that we are making the right choice, and thereby hoping we can avoid any risk of injury or mistake.
Evaluation and Meaning
An essential aspect of the evaluation process is the development of meaning for life events. Meaning is not merely a supposition of facts; but rather, meaning is value-based, emerging out of our motivation for evaluation. According to moral psychologist, Nicolas Dent, meaning emerges from an active, evaluative engagement with life events through a process of deliberation. This evaluative-deliberation combines thought with passion, culminating in an experience of meaningfulness. The evaluative-deliberation begins with our emotional participation in an event and is then followed by thoughtful reflection. This combination results in the subjective experience of pondering and emotional engagement. Such an evaluative-deliberation clarifies the value a certain situation may have for us. With a clear evaluation, a sense of the meaning emerges, along with a possible sense of purpose and intentionality towards the situation. These three elements: desire, deliberation, and intention are recursively involved in the evaluative-deliberation experience.
Deliberation is not a passionless reasoning, but rather an integration of reason and passion combined with an awareness of our circumstances. In The Moral Psychology of the Virtues, Dent asserts that the deliberation processes is a kind of rational desire — not pure thinking and not pure passion. Rational desire is not a discrete state of mind. It is an integrated system of memory, reason, and emotion that shapes and articulates our interests and intentions. Without the integration of feelings and thoughts, we may fluctuate between compartmentalized rationality and myopic passions. By utilizing both desire and rationality, we are able to think about what we feel, while having those feelings. When we are engaged in deliberation, emotions are not mindless responses and reason is not passionless cognition.
The capacity for adaptive evaluation of life experiences arises from both reason and passion. Deliberation is the capacity to think while considering our beliefs and passionate choices. Deliberation is not merely weighing the intensity of multiple desires and then acting on the predominant desire. In true deliberation, we are making an appraisal of the overall impact a particular pursuit will have on our well-being. The evaluation-motivation, when harnessed to deliberation becomes a capacity for purposeful organization of our intentions and an increasing sense of self-agency.
Our deliberations are shaped by our belief about what best contributes to our flourishing. Deliberation requires knowing yourself and knowing the nature and force of your desires. The capacity for deliberation emerges when we are able to be authentic in our self-coherence.
Evaluation Emotions
Our emotions play a critical role in determining the quality of our evaluative-deliberations. The blending of thinking and feeling, essential to a balanced deliberation, is enhanced by some emotions and challenged by other. Emotions such as fear and anger will restrict our capacity for reflection. Whereas the moral emotions, such as shame, guilt, remorse, regret, and compassion will fuel the deliberation process. By engaging with our moral emotions, we enhance our capacity for evaluative-deliberation. Specifically, our capacity for remorse, regret, and compassion increases over time as we engage in the process of deliberation. Psychoanalysts, such as Donald Winnicott and Melanie Klein, have identified that these emotions represent a psychological, developmental milestone marking our increased ability to think about painful, emotional experiences.
Regret and remorse are aspects of the evaluative-deliberation process that help us to think emotionally, allowing us to reflect on painful losses and to learn from our mistakes. These emotions provide us with information about our situation and can facilitate our ability for repair and reparation. Regret and remorse are emotional articulations of our healing response to injury. They allow us to forgive, apologize, or make reparations without developing resentment. These emotional sequences are part of the adaptive mechanism inherent to our evaluative-motivational stem. They can also motivate us to become our better-self, thereby increasing self-esteem and self efficacy.
Remorse and regret are often preceded by the moral emotions of shame and guilt. Shame and guilt are punishing feelings that bring our attention to problematic situations. This orienting function is critical for initiating the evaluation process; however, shame and guilt will only lead to repair and reparation if they trigger in us feelings of regret and remorse. That is why even though we might be plagued by guilt or shame; we may continue to reenact the injurious situation. Regret is an aspect of learning where we can place the pain of shame and regret in a larger cognitive context. Shame and guilt often prevent this needed increase in cognition. When we are able to deliberate on the circumstances that caused our guilt or shame, we are able to engage our evaluative-motivation leading to change and personal growth.
Sometimes in the face of punishing feelings, guilt or shame are too overwhelming and we may simply try to forget the past. This emotional strategy may seem to afford relief, but it does not facilitate learning and development. Nietzsche held a contrary position when he declared that forgetting is the only adaptive choice for resolving errors of the past. In a world without purpose, he held that forgetting was the only rational action possible. Since there was no purpose to the world, we should each strive to maximize our individual power, and in such a person there is no room for memory triggering guilt and shame. Nietzsche’s evaluative-deliberations led him to his emphasis on will-to-power as humankind’s purpose. However, this is not the only possible conclusion to draw from our deliberations about purpose in life. There are other evaluative emotions that lead to very different motivational outcomes.
Contrary to a soporific of forgetting, compassion can be a viable, emotional stance for facilitating adaptive evaluation of life events. According to moral philosopher, Rosalind Hursthouse, compassion is the most adaptive, emotional stance because it offers us the widest range of choices in life. Compassion allows us to deliberate from a position of care and acceptance. This expands our range of choices because it increases our empathic understanding of others and ourselves. Compassion also increases our ability to tolerate distress. It provides a sense of caring that can sooth distress. Without compassion, painful feelings may become debilitatingly masochistic or trigger coping strategies such as projection or denial, negating our ability to learn and adapt.
Deliberation is like a mental muscle, the more we use it the more resilient and adaptive it becomes. Our active engagement in making evaluative-deliberations expands our range or thinking and feeling, decreasing our ruminative pain and enhancing our response repertoire.