In “Feelings and phenomenal experiences” by Schwarz and Clore, in Social Psychology: Handbook of Basic Principles, they discuss the role of feelings in social behavior. They especially consider “feelings as a source of information.” They profile the literature concerning bodily experiences (e.g. hunger, pain, arousal), emotions (with a referent), moods (lacking a referent), “cognitive experiences” (e.g. surprise, boredom), “fluency” (including “processing fluency,” “perceptual fluency,” and “conceptual fluency,” none of which I have the time or space to explain). They explain that “central to the feelings-as-information approach is the assumption that people draw on their affective, cognitive and bodily experiences as a source of information” (pp. 385-386). This impacts areas such as judgment, memory, and “processing style.” The effects of feelings “depends on the specific task at hand and positive feelings can facilitate positive outcomes as well as negative ones (such as increased stereotyping and impaired logical problem solving)” (p. 398). This perspective is helpful in disputing the demand for a fully rationalized social science, and for its mere possibility. Affective knowledge, bodily experiences, and the technologies that mitigate their development and expression are not only important to consider, but also to affirm.

In When Technology Wounds, Chellis Glendinning related the role of feelings in the phenomenal experience of individuals harmed by technology. She considers their subjective experiences of those who were not only affectively, but also bodily experienced the trauma of toxins that maimed and disabled them. I tend to see a tendency among social scientists to identify the non-rational with the irrelevant. Emotive and bodily sensation is off the table as a legitimate or useful way of knowing. I tend to believe that this reflects the standpoint of one situated in a highly technological society: when one is surrounded by artifice and machinery, one sees the artificial and mechanical as the material more germane than emotional and bodily experiences. I am not surprised that those social scientists emerged in an environment in which 1-5% of the natural environment remains that they would make an argument in total seriousness that the artificial and natural are identical, and any separation is a completely social construction. Glendinning wrote that “As the world has become less organic and more dependent on techno-fixes for problems created by earlier techno-fixes, humans have substituted a new worldview for one once filled with clean rushing waters, coyotes, constellations of stars, tales of the ancestors, and people working together in sacred purpose.” The average social scientist would likely smugly disregard such a statement as nostalgic nonsense, bolstered by an essentialized and Romantic myth. But no doubt, our bodily and emotive experiences are an undeniable force in our lives, in how we form judgements.

Other social psychologists and ecopsychologists have conducted considerable research on the role of context, space and environment in affective responses. Glendinning’s point about the importance of the organic and of purpose may seem Romantic, but it’s also an empirical claim. It also happens to be fairly well supported by the building body of research.