Chapter 8: Rationality

Good to talk to you again. David.

Today we have to have a spotless discussion because it is about the topic of rationality. So if we make any error, the irony will actually bring us down.

Just like when we talk about memory, we always forget our stories. When we talk about language, we're just fluent.

That's right. This is a big question. I mean, I know all of these are big questions, but this is one of the big questions. I mean, this is what distinguishes us from the animals, right? We are rational creatures. We have the ability to use logic, to use reason induction deduction, to arrive at truth. And that surely is what separates humankind from the mere beasts of the field.

That's very lyrical.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Man is the rational animal. There's a lot of debate about things, but I'm not sure there's anybody I know who disagree with what you said just now, which is we can do logic and higher mathematics and advanced reasoning. We've come up with abstract theories of space and time. We've come up with science far, far beyond what any other creature can do. Here we are talking about the mind, and it's so beyond what anybody else could do. But there is a big debate in.

Our field over whether to think of.

This rationality as something fundamental to our being, to how we think, versus this sort of really great thing we could sometimes very rarely do. And most of the time we're disasters at it.

Right. That we can learn calculus doesn't mean that we're using those tools even 1% of the time. There's a historical arc to this argument, which is that we were very proud of our rationality and our intelligence as a species. It used to be that we were portrayed as God like in our ability.

To reason, the spirit of the Enlightenment.

But you bring in Darwin saying, well, we're just not. We're animals. We're just a little bit different than other animals. And someone like Freud who says, yeah, you thought you were guided by reasoning and rationality and all this stuff, but you're really just guided by the dumb, baser instincts. You just don't know it. And you have somebody like Skinner who comes along and says, Reason? What are you even talking about? This is all essentially a fancy version of the reflex arc where we are stimulus response, stimulus response. And then you get the icing on the cake. Social psychology in the last 50 years that says, well, let's catalog all of the ways in which we make very, very dumb errors sort of dethroning us as the reasoner supreme.

That's a nice summary. There's a friend of ours who teaches a very popular intro Psych course, and as I was preparing to teach mine for the first time, I asked her, Is there a big argument she makes? And she said, absolutely. I try to convince the undergraduates they're.

Not as smart as they think they are.

I try to convince them that psychology shows that we're full of she called them mind bugs, where our mental faculties don't work as well as we think they do. And we really should know this and try to compensate for our terrible weaknesses in social psychology.

Such a central theme, the motto to.

Social psychologists is the power of the situation. And often that's a rebuke to people who say, well, we reason our way through. We're rational agents, we're moral agents. No, you're just a sucker to the power of the situation. Put you in this situation, you'll behave this way. Put you in another way, you'd behave that way. There's even some social psychologists who are at heart skeptical. But the very idea of even conscious deliberation that the voice you have in your head, if it exists at all, is epiphenomenal plays no role. We're just pawns. We're just molecules bouncing around, right?

And so you have these classic demonstrations where people believe that they're arriving at a decision or a judgment based on deliberation. But you can show, you can demonstrate through the experimental method that the experimenter was actually in control of why they made a decision. So, for instance, if I show you a particular set of works of art and I ask you which one you like the best, and you say, Well, I've always been a fan of impressionism. I sort of like this palette of colors, so I like this one the best. And then I, as an experimenter, say, Ha. No, it's just because people tend to choose the last of the set. And I can show that on average, people choose the last.

Timothy Wilson did a lot of that work, and he wrote a book called Strangers to Know. We think we're in charge, but we're not. We don't actually have any sense of what's going on. So you have all of that and then you toss in and this is how my chapter on the topic is framed. You toss in what I think just about everybody agrees is one of the great success stories of psychology, which is the collaboration between Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tursky. Tursky passed away many years ago, but Kahneman is still alive and doing wonderful interesting work, and he won a Nobel.

Prize for his work.

And the work seemed to catalog human irrationality. It created the field of behavioral economics, driving us away from the economist image of a rational, individual, rational agent, and really persuaded many psychologists that irrationality is the rule when it comes to our mental life.

The stroke of genius in Kahneman diversky's work was not just to demonstrate or to claim that we're irrational or stupid, but to show that we were stupid in very systematic ways, that there were some errors that we were prone to making that led to bad decisions, bad judgments all the time. And it's because we used a particular set of rules of thumb or heuristics as they refer to them. And these heuristics would systematically lead us astray.

I'm starting to live in chair of someone who's going to listen to us and then have to leave and break loose to the podcast right now and think, wow, humans are irrational. Those guys got it down. So I just want to kind of plant a flag on the idea that this entire skeptical view is deeply overstated. And I think you and I may disagree on the margins, but I think we both agree that there's a fundamental rationality that humans possess.

Absolutely. The first paper that you and I worked on together was a defense of rationality in the moral domain, which we get to here. But in many ways that paper, I think, represents something that I still believe. I think you still believe, which is that all of this research certainly shows something, but it doesn't show nearly as strongly as people think it does that we're just dumb.

And I'll make a simple just make the simple point, which is we're going to discuss some of these examples of biases people possess and they're very real. But at the same time the fact that we're discussing them and understanding that they're biases and the fact that people are going to listen to us and say, wow, oh yeah, we do this, but that's a mistake, tells us two things about the mind. One is that we may have these biases, but the second thing is we're smart enough to recognize them as biases.

You make as many people have made a comparison between visual illusions and these kinds of heuristics or biases. You could argue that taking the evidence that we use a particular set of heuristics to arrive at judgments and that these heuristics can often lead us astray. To take that as evidence of irrationality would be akin to arguing that because visual illusions are strong and easy to demonstrate in the lab that we're walking around just tripping over ourselves and falling off cliffs. And we don't do that. The very reason that we are efficient at navigating our physical environment is that we have very effective rules that convert the incoming information for us so that we don't have to explicitly calculate how far away an object is. And so you might say that that's true of cognitive illusions as well, that well, these heuristics are interesting, but only inasmuch as in the lab you can show that they lead judgment astray. All that means is that in the real world they don't lead us astray most of the time.

Yeah, and I think somebody arguing with us arguing. So I think the analogy is a good one. I think just as visual illusions are the product of an incredibly sophisticated machine for analyzing environment that under weird conditions gives rise to error. Cognitive illusions are precisely the same way. We are terrific reasoners in the real world and sometimes inevitably, we get it wrong and we call these illusions and psychologists figure out clever ways we get it wrong. But one dis analogy and I'm sensitive to this is somebody's cognitive illusions really matter. It's probably in real world visual illusions never matter. Maybe for some weird cases with pilots or some special cases some illusions matter for the most part. You could never learn about them in your life and be fine. But the cognitive illusions I think because the cognitive illusions arise because of the.

World we live in.

I think this is, in some sense a case of a mismatch that our reasoning mechanisms evolve for a much simpler