Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Reflections on Intelligence and Emotion

The speaker at Frassati last night, sort of in passing, mentioned that girls are usually smarter than men give them credit for, because girls tend to react with emotion and that confuses men who over time begin to assume the girl isn't as intelligent.

It is interesting to note that just because men react to a situation with pragmatism and reason does not mean they are devoid of emotion. We are not cold, heartless bastards, we are merely more inclined to analyze a situation than feel about it.

If not taken to an extreme, these traits are not faults. Over-emotionalism and over-analysis both create problems in human interaction, but the default first reaction, if moderate and devoid neither of thought nor of care, is a good way in which men and women counterpoint (it's a verb, I say so) one another.

1 comment:

  1. An alarming thing I heard recently (in the past year, maybe?) is that people who genuinely do not emote in response to their circumstances have great difficulty forming decisions: having only reason, they seem to approximate Buridan's Ass and waver for stretches of time.

    (and go ahead, verb all the nouns you like; it would seem that Shakespeare did, too)

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