Emotional reasoning
Taking a feeling as proof of what is true: I feel it, so it must be so. Typical sentence: ‘I feel like a failure, so I must be one.’
What drives it
Feelings are fast, vivid and carry a sense of certainty; trusting them avoids the slower work of checking. In anxiety it keeps the threat alive because the feeling of danger is read as evidence of danger.
How it shows
Work
‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this deal, so it’s off.’ Decisions justified by gut alone when the gut is fear. The person who feels like a fraud and treats that as evidence of fraud despite the results.
Relationships
‘I feel jealous, so you must be up to something.’ ‘I feel unloved, so you don’t love me.’ The partner’s actual behaviour becomes irrelevant to the argument.
Self
Ask yourself what the evidence is beyond the feeling; if the answer is ‘I just feel it’, you are reasoning from emotion.
What tells it apart
Dual-process thinking (System 1 and System 2): Expert intuition is reliable when it comes from repeated feedback in that specific field; emotional reasoning takes any feeling, including fear far outside one’s expertise, as proof.
Impostor phenomenon: The impostor feeling is a content; emotional reasoning is the step of treating that feeling as evidence. Someone who says ‘I feel like a fraud but the numbers say otherwise’ is not reasoning emotionally.
A test
Ask ‘if you didn’t feel this, what would the facts alone tell you?’; if the conclusion disappears, it rested on the feeling.
Questions to carry
- Setting the feeling aside, what would the facts alone say about the situation?
- Which feeling have I treated as proof, and what did the facts say?
How strong the research is
moderate. Experimental work in anxiety (inferring danger from one’s own anxiety) supports it, but it is studied far less than the CBT literature’s confidence suggests.
Where it comes from
Named by David Burns, 1980, building on Aaron T. Beck’s cognitive model; studied experimentally by Arnoud Arntz and colleagues, 1995
On the family tree: Aaron Beck, David Burns