Passion Can Inform Reason: Reply to Gianpiero Petriglieri

Comments on Emotions are Data, Too by Gianpiero Petriglieri | 9:00 AM May 9, 2014, Harvard Business Review

Thank you to Gianpiero Petriglieri for an important and beautifully written post! Emotion is critical, existentially, to our engagement with the world. Some might say emotion is engagement (see e.g., the work of Nico Frijda). His post helps us understand why it is important to come to know emotion experience in this way.

Gianpiero makes an important point in emphasizing that, as engagement with the world, emotion experience is not private. “What you and I feel at work has as much to do with what we are doing, and what others expect of people in our roles—and of someone who looks like us—as it does with our own inner lives…”

Interpersonal communication of the ineffable through observable emotion experience can have a valuable influence on working collective intelligence. It suggests that a unified theory is needed for collective intelligence and human bias, two important contributions of psychological science to business that have not yet been reconciled.

Thank you to Gianpiero for reviving perspectives emphasized by David Hume, Adam Smith, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau to help us understand the positive psychological and moral value of reason informed by passion, not to mention its effect on individual and collective efficacy.

Gary Edward Riccio, Ph.D., May, 2014