Reason and Emotion

Write about 300 words.

• How do you think you use them?
• What kind of balance is there in how you use these contrasting WOK?
• Can you think of any examples where you relied on both emotion and reason to ‘know’ something or decide on something?

Most of the time, my decision-making process contains two parts: I use emotions to decide what exactly do I want to achieve, and then use reasoning to think how am I going to most effectively achieve it. For example, when I choose subjects for IB last year, I used both my reasoning and emotion, went through a lot to finally make the decision. For choosing 1 subject in humanities, my possible choices are psychology, geography, business, and economics. For other subjects I just don’t even want to think about it, so that’s the emotion part. For this 4, I used reasoning: created a decision matrix; criteria are interest, my ability, future perspective. I remember business got the highest score so I chose business management despite that a lot of people were telling me that business is useless and more work compared to economics. Another decision is much harder: I need to choose 2 from biology, chemistry, and visual arts. Mr. Stirrat recommends me to use a method which is to record in a bar chart every day for what I intuitively want to choose. Then over 2 weeks, I can know which option got more points. I thought this idea is really interesting, but I didn’t use this method, because I do not trust my intuition at all. By reasoning, I should choose bio-chem. I’m not going to explain it in detail, but it’s just a better fit, better for my future, better for my score, and I like it too. However, when I went to tell my decision to Mr. Scott, it’s very difficult to say it out, and I felt really sad and meaningless for the following few days. And I changed chemistry back to visual art. My emotion is strong enough for me to ignore my reasoning in this situation. So I am the kind of person who would reason out everything but just decide on emotion. I’m not sure if it’s a good thing or a bad thing, but I feel lucky that I am able to follow my heart.