Clickbait and Fast Thinking: When Emotions Don’t Think & Take Over the Mind in Politics and Our Personal Lives with Dr. Bruce Hutchison

In this episode, I have the great pleasure to speak with Author and Clinical Psychologist Dr. Bruce Hutchison about his ground-breaking and very timely book “Emotions Don’t Think: Emotional Contagion in a Time of Turmoil”!

Dr. Hutchison explains that underneath our thoughts, actions, and behaviors are often unexamined, raw, and unconscious emotions and that we tend to follow them in an impulsive and reactive manner. This can have serious and dangerous repercussions and consequences not only in our daily interactions with each other where often anger and resentment become more pronounced and come to the forefront, but this can also be reflected in our political choices in terms of “emotional voting” and our overall beliefs.

By bringing and tapping into his impressive and wide-ranging personal experience as a clinical psychologist, Bruce offers various suggestions and solutions that each of us can benefit from to better manage and regulate our emotions. Furthermore, we provide different sports analogies to illustrate our views, in my case, an example of basketball while Bruce uses dodgeball to demonstrate our reactions to different emotions.

Throughout our discussion, neither one of us takes a political stance or position here but we attempt to bridge differences, create and foster a common ground of respect for ourselves and others, and empathize and understand what emotions, needs, and desires people are trying to express and communicate.