Human Rationality

I've recently become somewhat obsessed with the idea of "rational human action." Before I go any farther down what I think will be a contentious road, I will first say that I am by no means denying the amazing rational abilities of human beings, but as the reader might be beginning to suspect, I am calling the extent of their operation into question. It's my view that the rational abilities that we do have produce such impressive results that we jump to the conclusion that our behavior is entirely rational, as well as to the other questionable conclusion that non-rational behavior (or incompletely rational behavior) is useless.

My conclusions here are primarily based on my own experiences navigating my own life, and because of that they are certainly biased, and I'm willing to admit that I am definitely "less rational" than most other people in my social sphere. Yet, the extent of my own irrationality is so great that even if other people are substantially more rational than I am, they are still necessarily quote irrational.

But all of this is getting ahead of an important preliminary point: What is rationality in the first place? By rationality, I mean the type of propositional thinking that we use to navigate both the immediate physical world in front of us, as well as the symbolic world that we navigate when we make plans for the future. This rationality is similar to what I've called in the post below this the "logic of experience." For example, walking down the street, there is a light pole directly in front of me, and open sidewalk to the left. Rationality is the process that involves the integration of the various meanings present before me-the relation between the lightpole, the open sidewalk, my current goal/activity of walking in a specific direction in a specific part of the environment. Each of these has a variety of meanings and possible meanings, and my rationality is the process that weaves these meanings together, enabling me to acheive my goal within the constraints and possibilities of the conditions confronting me. As I mentioned above, rationality is not just used in the concrete physical world, but also the purely symbolic world. Planning my day, I take into account various factors such as what I want to do, what resources I have at my disposal, how much time I have, etc. Even though these various factors aren't in front of me, I can manipulate them symbolically to make symbolic plans.

These kinds of rational activity occur all the time. They might be called the "bread and butter" of our experience, and they occur consciously and unconsciously. But not all that we do is rational for various reasons. For one thing, we don't always take all that we know into account when we're making a decision. We might forget factors or constraints that would have otherwise affected what we would choose to do. In addition, the meanings of the various components that go into our decision making process are not completely stable. Just as the effect of someone yelling at 90 dB in a small room depends on the shape/size of the room, or the resulting bounce of a 200 lb man landing on a trampoline depends on other activity on the trampoline, so too does our evaluation of different possibilities depend on the other activity going on in our mind.

What accounts for the difference between this "less rational" functioning and the more clearcut rational thinking described above (e.g., I move to the left to avoid a light pole because I can't walk through it)? The difference seems to be the strength of the constraints. In the first examples, the constraints press tightly onto the decision making process, making for only one clear path of action. In the second example, the constraints allow for more flexibility; there isn't just one good course of action. Our ability to think through those types of situations is influenced by how much we are able to bring to mind that is relevant to our decision, even though, as I said, the weight of the factors we bring forth is partially a function of our mental state at the time (e.g., although I have a constant susceptibility to being sunburned, my susceptibility to taking this fact into account changes depending on whether I'm feeling reckless or health conscious).


There's another limitation to human rationality that I have not yet dealt with that I will mention briefly. So far, I have spoken about how people act rationally/irrationally in simple cause>effect situations. The rationality of a given decision depends on the framing of the relevant aspects of the decision (i.e., what is taken as cause and effect), as well as the knowledge involved in making the decision. A woman's decision to drive to work is rational if she must go 20 miles in 20 minutes, and owns a car. If she knows that a crucial bridge was washed away in a storm, blocking her path, her decision to drive to work is no longer rational (though it would have been if she had not known about the washout).

In the above example, the distinction between rationality and irrationality is clearcut and obvious. In the real world, things are often much more complicated. In the real world, the difference between knowing and not knowing something covers a large gray area in which certain things are to different degrees implied, but not explicitly obvious. Some effects of our actions are usually predictable, whereas others only show up under close examination. Still, no amount of examination is capable of showing us the complete implications of our actions, and in this way our rationality is limited.