The Subconscious Determines Our Emotional Tendency — The Standards of the Inner World

A person meets someone they have never met, with no stake between them and the shallowest of contact, and liking, dislike, or love at first sight is settled on the spot; afterwards, rational thought can find no reason for it. This paper builds one shape out of that: what is handed over is not a list of the other person's properties but the standards already standing in the mind of whoever is doing the weighing, and those standards are a distillate of experience — whatever recurred was kept, whatever was incidental was thrown away — so a single use stands in for many, and the speed needs no reason. Four everyday events become unintelligible if the shape of weighing is removed: reaction survives the removal of stakes; reasons added afterwards do not touch it; the same person fits a different setting; a hundred good things are listed and still no warmth appears. The mechanism works by screening, and may also be called a front-end mechanism of social contact: it narrows the range first, and saves the bill that would otherwise have to be paid by testing people one at a time. This paper addresses only where emotional tendency comes from and why the mechanism has to exist. How a tendency issues into a choice, and how standards might be changed, lie outside its scope. It defines no emotion, ranks no one, and predicts no relationship.