Why we need to be more emotional to save the world

Humanity is in a period of great upheaval. For people and organisations attempting to thrive in this tumultuous time, old mindsets and approaches no longer work. To create a better future where everyone can flourish, leaders and organisations need to find ways to engage and encourage emotions more fully.

In recent decades, an array of scientific insights have reshaped the way we view emotions, particularly in the way they affect how we think about the future. We have learned that emotions can be harnessed to guide us toward rational choices and cooperative action. Emotions can be geared toward long-term thinking and behaviour and are essential to the evaluation of simulated possible futures, known as “pragmatic prospection”.

If we are to truly shift course, to make individual commitments that allow us to build better futures, we need to find ways of using emotion to our advantage. For as Anne Frank said, “…feelings can’t be ignored, no matter how unjust or ungrateful they seem.” They are and will always be a part of us and we need to learn how to leverage them for the betterment of ourselves and the generations to come.

A good starting point for developing this kind of mindset is to nurture a suite of feelings known as “self-transcendent emotions”. These emotions – which include feelings of empathy, gratitude, and awe – evolved to help manage social relationships with others and orient humans to a world that is bigger than themselves. They can be found in any coalitional behaviour – from hunting a woolly mammoth to building a suspension bridge – which requires people to sacrifice short-sighted, egoistic gains in order to work together toward mutual benefits. They also manifest in intimate, individual actions, such as the advent of grandparenting.

Self-transcendent emotions allow people to manage complex, cooperative situations without needing to overtax their resource-intensive, rational thought processes. They also help delay the need for instant gratification or reward.

For example, empathy – our connection to other people’s thoughts, emotions, and well-being – motivates us to act positively on behalf of others.

Harnessing empathy – specifically transgenerational empathy – can help us make decisions that impact us for the better both today and for generations to come. This might include eating less red meat, which helps both our own cardiovascular health as well as the health of the ecosystem for decades to come. Empathy for future generations provides the positive emotional jolt needed to transcend our short-term impulse to take the easy way out – to take a car versus mass transit and at a more psychological level to have the difficult conversation today rather than let the underlying discontent fester for days or even decades.

But for all its power, empathy is also fragile, often going missing just when we need it most. For instance, people find it difficult to empathise with those who differ from them politically, racially, or ideologically. Similarly, empathy comes more naturally when we have direct access to people’s emotional cues – their faces, voices, and stories. As a result, people tend to empathise preferentially with others who are close to themselves: spatially, socially, and temporally. When this happens, we also dole out kindness in uneven, nepotistic, and potentially short-term ways.

But this limit is not “baked in” to the nature of empathy. Like other emotions, people can regulate empathy, pointing it toward targets with whom they might typically find it difficult to connect.

One way to build empathy is by cultivating a sense of psychological safety, especially through close connection to other people. For instance, reminding people of positive attachment figures, such as supportive family members, renders them more empathic and helpful to others. Likewise, reflecting on positive people in our histories can also help us to extend empathy to those beyond our immediate spheres. If we connect to the sacrifices made by our ancestors that have allowed us to flourish today, we can build upon that gratitude to influence how we might become great future ancestors for generations to come.

We also have reason to believe that emotional primes, like recalling experiences of awe or the perception of something vast, can promote altruistic action. Awe helps reduce the occurrence of “temporal discounting”, the tendency to undervalue a future reward in favour of an immediate, but lesser, return. The popular rise of the environmental movement, for instance, is often linked to the collective awe inspired by astronaut Bill Anders’ iconic “Earthrise” image.

If more policymakers were to seek a sense of awe from images like this or experiencing the raw beauty of nature, might they be more open to taking the drastic steps we need to tackle environmental issues like carbon emissions, pollution and biodiversity loss?

We as individuals too may rethink how we live our lives if we could harness this sense of awe. This has in part already been happening with the backlash against plastic. Natural history programmes like Blue Planet 2 create a sense of wonder at the natural world before cruelly showing us what we are doing to it. They led millions to seek ways of reducing their use of plastic and forced multinational corporations to do likewise.

Even less-desired emotions can be activated if they are useful to a task at hand. For instance, individuals who are about to get in an argument may guide themselves into anger, and individuals who are about to ask for a favour may likewise choose to feel sad. Emerging research suggests that we can also “point” emotions like these – by using visualisations of desired outcomes – toward particular long-term goals, like helping future generations to thrive or in planning for our far futures.