Although the resource-rationality approach is an excellent step in the right direction, in terms of how real people actually operate, the theoretical framework remains deeply inadequate. It may work well when gathering information for decision-making (toward maximizing utility, subject to budget constraints), but what about the more puzzling phenomenon of “vaccine hesitancy”? Parents refusing to vaccinate their children despite the safety, efficacy, and broad availability of vaccines (World Health Organization 2019)? Even stubbornly refusing to accept scientific evidence? What utility function are they maximizing in downright refusing information?
Is this more evidence of a cognitive architecture evolutionarily honed for quick and dirty intuitive judgments (Gilovich et al. Reference Gilovich, Griffin and Kahneman2002)? Hardwired constraints perhaps “mismatched” to contemporary environments (Tooby & Cosmides Reference Tooby and Cosmides2000) – outdated, error prone, dysfunctional? Or might something more biologically meaningful be happening here?
A foundational problem is that the emotional system – our innately affective computational capacities – is missing from the model. When the pleasurable and painful feeling categories are considered, it becomes clear that an evaluative information gathering process happens first, influencing, coloring, filtering subsequent cognitive perceptions and rational deliberations. Discussions of the “affect heuristic” (Slovic et al. Reference Slovic, Finucane, Peters, MacGregor, Gilovich, Griffin and Kahneman2002) have begun charting this territory, but the informational nature of emotional experience predates the emergence of neural structures (“cognition” proper) and carries a much deeper functional significance.
As I have argued elsewhere (Peil Reference Peil2012; Reference Peil2014), the chemistry of emotion evolved very early on in our single-celled ancestors, central to both sensori-motor control and adaptive immunity – once a singular Pangea-like function best described as “self-regulation.” Its self-regulatory informational dimension is born of the very self-organizing dynamics (Kauffman Reference Kauffman1993; Walleczek Reference Walleczek2006), self-maintaining agentic constraints (Mossio & Moreno Reference Mossio and Moreno2015), and entropy delaying principles that characterize life (Davies Reference Davies2019), those still undergirding the genetic, epigenetic, and immune regulatory networks that define and maintain multicellular organisms. Specifically, instantiated on transmembrane receptors, this chemistry delivers a three-step cybernetic control loop (a common engineering control principle in machines from thermostats to guided missiles and intelligent robots). It works like this: (1) An ongoing: comparison is made between the “self” and its “not-self” environment; (2) a signal occurs when imbalances are detected, which (3) triggers a self-correcting behavior that rebalances the system.
More generally, this self-regulatory chemistry still drives bacterial “info-taxis” (Bray Reference Bray2009), suggesting that emotion was the first sensory system to emerge on the evolutionary stage (Peil Reference Peil2014), with both the signal and its coupled corrective response (steps 2 and 3 of the control loop) experienced subjectively as hedonic qualia. No matter how it evolved, emotional sentience provided tremendous selective advantage, arming even the simplest organisms with the ability to sense and evaluate environmental affordances (Gibson Reference Gibson and Collins1982) as “good for me” or “bad for me” and respond correctively with approach or avoidant behaviors – even leaving behind memory traces for anticipatory responses. Indeed, the melding of binary feelings with bodily reactions undergirds all learning systems, Pavlov's (Reference Pavlov1927) “unconditioned” stimulus–response pair, the innately rewarding and punitive evaluative categories upon which more cognitively complex judgments, attitudes, motives, and habits are forged. Perhaps most importantly, this simple regulatory control chemistry instantiates the first crude sort of mind, an “enactive” or “5E” mind (Peil Reference Peil2017; Rowlands Reference Rowlands2010; Varela et al. Reference Varela, Thompson and Rosch1991), one fundamentally embodied in living material, cyclically enacted in real time, inseparably embedded in its local environment, extended through learning and niche construction, and evaluative given the central role of hedonic qualia. Such an emotionally in-formed mind affords living creatures direct participation in evolution, with the later neural enhancements adding more specific informational dimensions (via the need-oriented appraisal themes of basic and complex feelings) (Peil Reference Peil2012).
It is difficult to overstate the theoretical implications of the self-regulatory function of emotion. In terms of somatic (pre-neural) identity, this chemistry instantiates the “proto-self” (Damasio Reference Damasio1999), the self/not-self distinction of the immune system (Pert Reference Pert1998), is a central mediator of epigenetic (“not-yet-self”) development (Radley et al. Reference Radley, Kabbaj, Jacobson, Heydendael, Yehuda and Herman2011) and a likely suspect in placebo and nocebo effects (Peil Reference Peil2014). Misunderstanding the self-regulatory nature of emotional experience (and its hardwired behavioral safeguards) undergirds many of our problematic decision-making heuristics, “self-serving” biases, ego defenses, and unconscious behaviors. Ignorance of its informational dimension predicts a dysfunctional – largely pain-driven – pattern of identity management that fuels defense of narrow identity boundaries, competitive interpersonal conflict, political polarization, and religious fundamentalism. In terms of “anti-vaccination sentiment,” Hoffman et al. (Reference Hoffman, Felter, Chu, Shensa, Hermann, Wolynn and Primack2019) identified social mistrust, safety concerns, and conspiracy ideology as key drivers, all of which flow from the avoidance urges coupled to misunderstood feelings of fear.
But to begin reclaiming the meaningful first-person informational messages within our emotional perceptions opens upon an entire domain of evaluative rationality formerly opaque to science, and provides a bulwark against the social abuses of emotion. Indeed, the binary (feel good, feel bad) nature of hedonic qualia encodes several levels of binary logic concerning the well-being of the self across time and social space: The most fundamental is a biologically universal “yes” or “no” evaluative logic that subserves two non-negotiable, yet potentially conflicting evolutionary purposes (akin to economic “utility functions”). They are subjective reflections of the imperatives for natural selection: Painful feelings demand priority self-preservation of the body-self in its immediate environment (Darwinian “survival” – distress signals saying “no” to self-destruction), while pleasurable feelings foster more long-term self-development of the mind-self (Darwinian “adaptation” – “eustress” signals [Selye Reference Selye1957] saying “yes” to optimal growth, learning (including epigenetic development and neural plasticity) and culturally creative agency. A reversal of this self-regulatory logic gives rise to the closed-minded form of identity management exemplified in vaccine hesitancy – the exact opposite of that suggested by the logic of evolutionary utility and therefore self-destructive.
Through this lens, the resource rationality model can be enhanced by acknowledging the central role of pleasurable and painful feelings (along with their basic and complex appraisal themes) as first person informational resources, as well as dynamic capital for third-person punitive or rewarding social control, which together offer a missing dimension of emotional reasons that more accurately explain, predict, and might ultimately prevent behaviors like vaccine hesitancy.
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Although the resource-rationality approach is an excellent step in the right direction, in terms of how real people actually operate, the theoretical framework remains deeply inadequate. It may work well when gathering information for decision-making (toward maximizing utility, subject to budget constraints), but what about the more puzzling phenomenon of “vaccine hesitancy”? Parents refusing to vaccinate their children despite the safety, efficacy, and broad availability of vaccines (World Health Organization 2019)? Even stubbornly refusing to accept scientific evidence? What utility function are they maximizing in downright refusing information?
Is this more evidence of a cognitive architecture evolutionarily honed for quick and dirty intuitive judgments (Gilovich et al. Reference Gilovich, Griffin and Kahneman2002)? Hardwired constraints perhaps “mismatched” to contemporary environments (Tooby & Cosmides Reference Tooby and Cosmides2000) – outdated, error prone, dysfunctional? Or might something more biologically meaningful be happening here?
A foundational problem is that the emotional system – our innately affective computational capacities – is missing from the model. When the pleasurable and painful feeling categories are considered, it becomes clear that an evaluative information gathering process happens first, influencing, coloring, filtering subsequent cognitive perceptions and rational deliberations. Discussions of the “affect heuristic” (Slovic et al. Reference Slovic, Finucane, Peters, MacGregor, Gilovich, Griffin and Kahneman2002) have begun charting this territory, but the informational nature of emotional experience predates the emergence of neural structures (“cognition” proper) and carries a much deeper functional significance.
As I have argued elsewhere (Peil Reference Peil2012; Reference Peil2014), the chemistry of emotion evolved very early on in our single-celled ancestors, central to both sensori-motor control and adaptive immunity – once a singular Pangea-like function best described as “self-regulation.” Its self-regulatory informational dimension is born of the very self-organizing dynamics (Kauffman Reference Kauffman1993; Walleczek Reference Walleczek2006), self-maintaining agentic constraints (Mossio & Moreno Reference Mossio and Moreno2015), and entropy delaying principles that characterize life (Davies Reference Davies2019), those still undergirding the genetic, epigenetic, and immune regulatory networks that define and maintain multicellular organisms. Specifically, instantiated on transmembrane receptors, this chemistry delivers a three-step cybernetic control loop (a common engineering control principle in machines from thermostats to guided missiles and intelligent robots). It works like this: (1) An ongoing: comparison is made between the “self” and its “not-self” environment; (2) a signal occurs when imbalances are detected, which (3) triggers a self-correcting behavior that rebalances the system.
More generally, this self-regulatory chemistry still drives bacterial “info-taxis” (Bray Reference Bray2009), suggesting that emotion was the first sensory system to emerge on the evolutionary stage (Peil Reference Peil2014), with both the signal and its coupled corrective response (steps 2 and 3 of the control loop) experienced subjectively as hedonic qualia. No matter how it evolved, emotional sentience provided tremendous selective advantage, arming even the simplest organisms with the ability to sense and evaluate environmental affordances (Gibson Reference Gibson and Collins1982) as “good for me” or “bad for me” and respond correctively with approach or avoidant behaviors – even leaving behind memory traces for anticipatory responses. Indeed, the melding of binary feelings with bodily reactions undergirds all learning systems, Pavlov's (Reference Pavlov1927) “unconditioned” stimulus–response pair, the innately rewarding and punitive evaluative categories upon which more cognitively complex judgments, attitudes, motives, and habits are forged. Perhaps most importantly, this simple regulatory control chemistry instantiates the first crude sort of mind, an “enactive” or “5E” mind (Peil Reference Peil2017; Rowlands Reference Rowlands2010; Varela et al. Reference Varela, Thompson and Rosch1991), one fundamentally embodied in living material, cyclically enacted in real time, inseparably embedded in its local environment, extended through learning and niche construction, and evaluative given the central role of hedonic qualia. Such an emotionally in-formed mind affords living creatures direct participation in evolution, with the later neural enhancements adding more specific informational dimensions (via the need-oriented appraisal themes of basic and complex feelings) (Peil Reference Peil2012).
It is difficult to overstate the theoretical implications of the self-regulatory function of emotion. In terms of somatic (pre-neural) identity, this chemistry instantiates the “proto-self” (Damasio Reference Damasio1999), the self/not-self distinction of the immune system (Pert Reference Pert1998), is a central mediator of epigenetic (“not-yet-self”) development (Radley et al. Reference Radley, Kabbaj, Jacobson, Heydendael, Yehuda and Herman2011) and a likely suspect in placebo and nocebo effects (Peil Reference Peil2014). Misunderstanding the self-regulatory nature of emotional experience (and its hardwired behavioral safeguards) undergirds many of our problematic decision-making heuristics, “self-serving” biases, ego defenses, and unconscious behaviors. Ignorance of its informational dimension predicts a dysfunctional – largely pain-driven – pattern of identity management that fuels defense of narrow identity boundaries, competitive interpersonal conflict, political polarization, and religious fundamentalism. In terms of “anti-vaccination sentiment,” Hoffman et al. (Reference Hoffman, Felter, Chu, Shensa, Hermann, Wolynn and Primack2019) identified social mistrust, safety concerns, and conspiracy ideology as key drivers, all of which flow from the avoidance urges coupled to misunderstood feelings of fear.
But to begin reclaiming the meaningful first-person informational messages within our emotional perceptions opens upon an entire domain of evaluative rationality formerly opaque to science, and provides a bulwark against the social abuses of emotion. Indeed, the binary (feel good, feel bad) nature of hedonic qualia encodes several levels of binary logic concerning the well-being of the self across time and social space: The most fundamental is a biologically universal “yes” or “no” evaluative logic that subserves two non-negotiable, yet potentially conflicting evolutionary purposes (akin to economic “utility functions”). They are subjective reflections of the imperatives for natural selection: Painful feelings demand priority self-preservation of the body-self in its immediate environment (Darwinian “survival” – distress signals saying “no” to self-destruction), while pleasurable feelings foster more long-term self-development of the mind-self (Darwinian “adaptation” – “eustress” signals [Selye Reference Selye1957] saying “yes” to optimal growth, learning (including epigenetic development and neural plasticity) and culturally creative agency. A reversal of this self-regulatory logic gives rise to the closed-minded form of identity management exemplified in vaccine hesitancy – the exact opposite of that suggested by the logic of evolutionary utility and therefore self-destructive.
Through this lens, the resource rationality model can be enhanced by acknowledging the central role of pleasurable and painful feelings (along with their basic and complex appraisal themes) as first person informational resources, as well as dynamic capital for third-person punitive or rewarding social control, which together offer a missing dimension of emotional reasons that more accurately explain, predict, and might ultimately prevent behaviors like vaccine hesitancy.