...New research says there’s another way to look at it. What if people often choose to be irrational in cases where doing the rational thing would violate something they value more — like socially conscious behavior? And if that’s the case, should we actually embrace some instances of irrationality rather than discounting it as an embarrassing nuisance?
...That’s one of the possibilities raised in an interesting psychology study published last week in Science Advances. Researchers based at the University of Waterloo in Canada wanted to understand what prompts people to use rationality — or deviate from it — in their decision-making. To get at this, they first analyzed reams of text to see what people generally take rationality to mean. Then they conducted 12 experiments, recruiting people from Amazon Mechanical Turk to play classic economic games like the Dictator Game online and answer questions about their behavior.
The study starts by distinguishing between two terms: there’s rationality, where you focus on maximizing the chance of getting what you want, and there’s reasonableness, where you strike a balance between what you want and social norms.
Although we might sometimes use rational and reasonable interchangeably, the study shows that people generally associate the former with the cold hard logic of self-interest and the latter with socially conscious traits like kindness or cooperativeness....
...But is it better to act rationally or reasonably? The researchers conducted some experiments to understand people’s perceptions, expectations, and behaviors. Here are five key findings:
- Participants perceived reasonable people as less selfish than rational people.
- Participants expected that reasonable people would share more than rational people.
- Their expectation turned out to be correct: People who viewed themselves as reasonable shared significantly more than those who viewed themselves as rational.
- In a Dictator Game, an experiment where you’re given money and have to decide whether to give some of it away, participants donated 5 percent more money if they were aiming to be reasonable than if they were aiming to be rational.
- When participants were asked to recall either reasonable or rational actions from their lives, and then to take part in a Dictator Game, it turned out that recalling a reasonable action led to offers that were slightly higher than did recalling a rational action. Plus, whereas 14 percent of participants in the rational condition wanted to donate nothing, only 9.5 percent of those in the reasonable condition said the same (in fact, 71 percent of them donated at least half the money).
Together, these findings offer us insights that cut against our inherited ways of thinking about what constitutes sound decision-making. Ditching rationality in favor of reasonableness might actually make sense in some contexts, they suggest — especially because we’ve lately defined rationality in such a narrow way that it’s just not always the most useful standard of judgment....
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Originally Posted by waltky
