| Summary: | In this interview given to Julien Bernard at the Collège de France on December 5th, 2012, Jon Elster provides a clearer perspective on his vision of the relationship between emotions, rationality and norms as far as motivations of action are concerned. According to him, emotions are to be understood in their relation to desires and beliefs that give birth to them. They often imply a logic of immediate action, at the risk of irrationality, while being at the same time a force, a « driving engine » of social norms. In return, social norms, just like the scope and shape of emotional conceptualizations in different eras and cultures, can make their way into the emotional choice by means of beliefs about the appropriate behavior according to situations and by the means of identifying what is being experienced. Norms do not necessarily hinder emotional action. On the contrary, some of them do encourage emotional reactions. Elster thus shows that the impact emotions have on cognition, bypassing the optimal quest for information, is most often negative. This is one of the reasons why, for him, studying emotional mechanisms such as the decline of emotion in tome or the transmutation of emotions, is a necessary task if one wants to analyze social actions.
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