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My friend and I like to discuss emotions, as we often have a difficult time understanding exactly why people act the way they do. From what I've been slowly figuring out as time goes on is that emotions can be expressed as a highly simplified form of logic.

Let's say we travel back many many years to where our neocortex was still under heavy developement. Life was significantly simpler because we couldn't fathom anything more complex than food, sex, and territory. From these, essentially all of our other emotions can be derived; happiness from success in any of those fields, sadness in a loss of sex, anger in a loss of territory, disquiet in a loss of food, and so on.

In this way, it makes sense that we didn't need a high level of logic, and that our emotions are a simpler form of logic that did a very good job of keeping us alive. In a sense, then, logic can be visualized as an onion of sorts. In our current state of evolution, it has merely two to three distinct layers: one being the logic that we traditionally associate with the word; another with emotions, which are still a high order process; and yet another which would be something along the lines of reflexes, where we are hardly even conscious of their presence, yet they are a super simple ways of keeping our bodily health, this would be akin to lobsters or snails who have decentralized brains - this would be our spinal cord and/or nervous system.

Therefore, it boils down that people are extremely predictable if their actions are treated as though they use a different form of logic, which they do. If a person feels in danger, they will attempt to defend themselves, perhaps not effectively, in such that their way of life will be preserved. If a person feels comfortable or complacent, they will take more risks and seek to expand their territory. Abstractly speaking, it is important to analyze a situation to identify how a person may react to that situation based off of how that situation may make them feel (eg a person may defend themself from a financial threat by creating a savings account, or they may take a risk because they're used to not having money).

In the end, evolution has made us want to live. It has specifically given our minds the sole purpose of continuing our genetic code, any and all forms of logic that are present exist to serve that goal; anything that appears otherwise is ismply a byproduct of that.