ABSTRACT
According to the emotional disruption view of irrationality, the unconscious needs, hang-ups, wishes, and so on, disrupting rational thought might have no particular systematic structures. When an unconscious force becomes strong enough, it simply breaks through barriers, whether it involves consciousness, commitment to coherent belief, or commitment to act in accord with the dictates of Plato's "rational part" of the soul. Then irrationality would not be systematic at all. A number of subsequent theorists have argued that Freud failed in his attempts to categorize and comprehend these irrational emotional factors. Another view is that irrationality is systematic, but need not result from logic of disruptive forces. Instead, there are certain automatic ways of thinking that systematically inhibit rational thought. Thus, the emotional connotations of our reasoning can lead to irrational results, for the simplest of cognitive reasons—differential acceptance of incomplete specification due to differential scrutiny.
