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We are told that we are an irrational tangle of biases, to be nudged any which way. Does this claim stand to reason?

A culture that believes its citizens are not reliably competent thinkers will treat those citizens differently to one that respects their reflective autonomy. Which kind of culture do we want to be? And we do have a choice. Because it turns out that the modern vision of compromised rationality is more open to challenge than many of its followers accept.

Modern skepticism about rationality is largely motivated by years of experiments on cognitive bias.

Douglas Van Praet argues that while decision making is governed by our emotions, brands should still provide people with a logical lifeline (but they should steer clear of research that lets the post-rationalizing tail wag the emotional dog).

One of the longest-running debates in marketing is whether to use a rational or emotional advertising approach in marketing--but cognitive science says that argument is pointless. While emotions overwhelmingly drive behavior, it is misguided to believe that thinking and feeling are somehow mutually exclusive. Emotion and logic are intertwined. Behavioral science is now telling us that we don’t really have “free will.” We have “free won’t.” We can give in to the visceral impulses that drive us or choose to apply the brakes of rational restraint. While we can’t choose our emotions because they originate unconsciously, we can choose our conscious response to our feelings. This is essentially what consciousness is--a series of critical reflections and interpretations about how we are feeling.

ARE you intelligent — or rational? The question may sound redundant, but in recent years researchers have demonstrated just how distinct those two cognitive attributes actually are.

The major finding was that irrationality — or what Professor Stanovich called “dysrationalia” — correlates relatively weakly with I.Q. A person with a high I.Q. is about as likely to suffer from dysrationalia as a person with a low I.Q.

Based on this evidence, Professor Stanovich and colleagues have introduced the concept of the rationality quotient, or R.Q. If an I.Q. test measures something like raw intellectual horsepower (abstract reasoning and verbal ability), a test of R.Q. would measure the propensity for reflective thought — stepping back from your own thinking and correcting its faulty tendencies.

The first steps to answering these questions were taken almost a century ago, at the height of the American Jazz Age. At the time, the new-fangled IQ test was gaining traction, after proving itself in World War One recruitment centres, and in 1926, psychologist Lewis Terman decided to use it to identify and study a group of gifted children. Combing California’s schools for the creme de la creme, he selected 1,500 pupils with an IQ of 140 or more – 80 of whom had IQs above 170. Together, they became known as the “Termites”, and the highs and lows of their lives are still being studied to this day.

Recently, at the Dumbo Arts Festival, in Brooklyn, an artist named Risa Puno stood at a table and gave out cookies in exchange for personal information such as a driver’s license number, a mother’s maiden name, or the last four digits of a Social Security number. This information was entered on a form that assigned values to various pieces of identifying data—one point for your first pet’s name, three points for your home address, five points for your fingerprints, and so on—and different types of cookies required different numbers of points.

Maybe, instead of asking why people don’t react rationally to online threats, we should be asking whether it’s possible to react rationally to the contradictory ways in which we engage with the Web

There is indeed ample data that institutions and individuals can wreak havoc when they deviate from certain principles of logic and objectivity. There is also a good deal of dispiriting evidence about the rationality of voters that spurs questions about the effectiveness—and even the legitimacy—of democratic government. Yet much of the work of cognitive scientists—even fascinating Nobel Prize-winning research by Daniel Kahneman—leaves me edified but not alarmed. The human capacity for reason may be fragile and partial but it is not belied by studies in which large percentages of subjects answer a few tricky questions incorrectly.

My hypothesis is that while we love reading about humanity’s tendency toward the irrational, we take offense when light is thrown on our own individual incompetencies. 

Why we are not as rational as we think, and why that matters

In 2011, Martin Kemp, an Oxford art history professor, ran an experiment referenced in Ragai’s book, in which 14 non-specialists were shown genuine and fake “Rembrandt” paintings while undergoing brain scans. A painting was shown to them and they were told it was by Rembrandt. Another painting was shown to them and they were told it was a fake. By measuring the pleasure centers of the brain, Kemp concluded that “the way we view art is not rational.” Being told a work was authentic (whether or not it actually was) activated pleasure centers when it was shown, which was not the case when the viewer was told it was inauthentic (even if it was actually the real deal). It’s all about anticipation. If you’re poured a glass of wine and told it’s a 1955 Chateau Lafite Rothschild, you’ll enjoy it much more than if you’re told it’s a 2015 Trader Joe’s wine-in-a-box, whichever it truly happens to be. (For more on this, see my eBook single on wine forgery).

But while non-experts are led by being told what is authentic and what is not, clever forgers do a more elaborate version of the same thing to snare specialists. Rather than telling them “this is authentic,” which would summon a defensive reaction on the part of the expert (“Oh yeah, I’m the expert here, I’ll tell you what’s authentic and what isn’t”), they lay a trail of traps by scattering subtle clues that lead the expert into following a carefully plotted trail, but to come to their own conclusion about the authenticity of the work in question.

Most people would agree that terrorism is no good. The word itself is rich with moralized connotations. It is true that some have argued that terrorism might sometimes be justified, but in popular discourse, terrorism is typically deemed obviously horrible. What are the consequences of branding some action an act of terrorism, or of branding some group a terrorist group? Note, in connection with this question, the ratcheting up of rhetoric surrounding ‘cyberterrorism,’ with many government officials now listing it as a major ongoing threat (e.g., here and here). A recent study by Adam Feltz and Edward Cokely of the Michigan Institute of Technology found that describing a group of people as ‘terrorist’ had far-reaching results. In general, participants in their study were less willing to “understand the group’s grievances,” less willing to “negotiate with the group.” Further, participants in their study found violence directed towards a group described as terrorist more permissible, and perceived such a group as less rational when compared to a group not described as terrorist.

So it is important to be aware of the ways labels such as terrorist subtly influence the way we perceive other groups of people, and also of the way we perceive people we implicitly associate with such groups.

What makes moral disagreements so intractable? Ethics shouldn’t be as hard as rocket science. Can religion help? It might seem that if morality is a matter of obeying divine commands, we could make short work of moral disagreement, if only we knew which was the true faith. Of course, we don’t. But 2,300 years ago Plato showed that appeals to God’s wisdom, no matter which faith, is irrelevant to what makes for moral rightness.

What about reason? Many philosophers have argued that rational beings can reason their way to the right answers in morality. Kant and Mill both tried to do this, but ended up building incompatible moral theories by reasoning from two quite different starting points.

In recent years some thinkers have argued that the foundations of morality are given by what science, especially evolutionary biology, shows us about the conditions of human flourishing. These philosophers, social psychologists and evolutionary anthropologists argue that there was strong selection for a core set of moral norms that are so widespread they are absent only in psychopaths.

“Just as with the physical world, where hurricanes, tornadoes, and other ‘acts of God’ just happen, the same is true of the social world,” he wrote. “Some people just do things. They assassinate world leaders, act on poorly thought out ideologies, and leave clues at the scene of the crime. Too strong a belief in the rationality of people in general, or of the world, will lead us to seek purposive explanations where none exists.”

He says conspiracy theorists rely on what he calls “errant data,” or random minutiae within a terror attack or major event that can—and maybe should—go unexplained in reality. Those pushing conspiracies, however, seize on that unexplained info and attempt to explain it in full.It is an effort to connect every dot on the map—every blade of grass on the Grassy Knoll—even if some dots have nothing to with the larger event at all

Crisis class theory is a weirdly hopeful, terribly reductionist coping mechanism, a way to explain a world that can be unjust and needlessly cruel—but wouldn’t be if the “bad guys” controlling it all were vanquished.“There is surely some psychological comfort in believing that a horrific event like a mass murder of schoolchildren never really happened at all—that it was all fake,” he writes.

Very few economists foresaw the great recession of 2008–2009. Why not? Economists have long assumed that human beings are “rational,” but behavioral findings about human fallibility have put a lot of pressure on that assumption. People tend to be overconfident; they display unrealistic optimism; they often deal poorly with risks; they neglect the long term (“present bias”); and they dislike losses a lot more than they like equivalent gains (“loss aversion”). And until recent years, most economists have not had much to say about the problem of inequality, which seems to be getting worse.

By emphasizing human fallibility, the group of scholars known as behavioral economists has raised a lot of doubts about this view. Their catalog of errors on the part of consumers and investors can be taken to identify a series of “behavioral market failures,” each of them calling for some kind of government response (such as information campaigns to promote healthy eating or graphic warnings to discourage smoking). But George Akerlof and Robert Shiller want to go far beyond behavioral economics, at least in its current form. They offer a much more general, and quite damning, account of why free markets and competition cause serious problems.

The most interesting aspect of the hundred-million-dollar Giacometti is that it isn’t unique. “Chariot” comes from an edition of six—each of which, we can now assume, is worth roughly the same amount.

It’s entirely rational to think that value goes down as edition size goes up—that if a sculpture is in an edition of six, then it will be worth less than if it were unique or in an edition of two. But the art market is weird, and doesn’t work like that—or, at least, it doesn’t work like that anymore, since it has become an extension of the luxury-goods market. In order for an artist to have value as a brand, he has to have a certain level of recognizability—and for that he needs a critical mass of work. Artists with low levels of output (Morandi, say) generally sell for lower prices than artists with high levels of output—the prime example being Andy Warhol. The more squeegee paintings that Gerhard Richter makes, the more they’re worth. In the case of “Chariot,” the other versions of the sculpture don’t dilute the value of the art so much as ratify it.

Since the late 19th century in the United States, critical responses to the spectacle of pain in executions have continued to spur ardent calls for the improvement of killing technology. One of the most prolific legal theorists of capital punishment, Austin Sarat, has concisely referred to this history: “The movement from hanging to electrocution, from electrocution to the gas chamber, from gas to lethal injection, reads like someone’s version of the triumph of progress, with each new technique enthusiastically embraced as the latest and best way to kill without imposing pain.” Recent debates over the administration of midazolam and pentobarbital, and in what dosage, seamlessly integrate themselves into Sarat’s grim progress narrative. The inexhaustible impulse to seek out less painful killing technologies puts a series of questions in sharp relief: What is, and should be, the role of pain in retributive justice? And how has the law come to rationalize the condemned’s experience of pain during an execution? While the Eighth Amendment stipulates the necessity of avoiding “cruel and unusual punishment,” in 1890 the Supreme Court decided this clause could mean that no method of execution should impose “something more than the mere extinguishment of life.” And then, in 1958, the court also determined that the amendment should reflect the “evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.” If we were to consider the “standard of decency” in our society today, we would be pushed to ask: By what moral order have we continued to establish the “extinguishment of life” as something “mere,” and the pain of the condemned as excessive? In other words, how has the pain experienced during an execution become considered cruel and unconstitutional but not the very act of killing itself? We should dial back to older histories of law to tap into pain’s perennially vexed role in retributive theories of justice.