Why we’re not as irrational as the nudgers want us to think The present climate of distrust in our reasoning capacity finds much of its rationale in the field of behavioural economics, particularly the work by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky described in Kahneman’s bestselling Thinking, Fast and Slow. Other versions of the message are expressed in more strongly negative terms. You Are Not So Smart is the title of a bestselling popular book on cognitive bias. According to a widely reported study by researchers Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, reason evolved not to find “truth” but merely to win arguments. And in The Righteous Mind, the psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls the idea that reason is “our most noble attribute” a mere “delusion”. The worship of reason, he adds, “is an example of faith in something that does not exist. And so there is less reason than many think to doubt humans’ ability to be reasonable. The dissenting critiques of the cognitive-bias literature argue that people are not, in fact, as individually irrational as the present cultural climate assumes. And proponents of debiasing argue that we can each become more rational with practice. But even if we each acted as irrationally as often as the most pessimistic picture implies, that would be no cause to abandon the idea that humans are a fundamentally rational species. And it would be insufficient motivation to flatten democratic deliberation into the weighted engineering of consumer choices, as nudge politics seeks to do. Public reason is nothing short of our best hope for survival. Even a reasoned argument to the effect that human rationality is fatally compromised is itself an exercise in rationality. Albeit rather a perverse one, and — we may suppose — ultimately self-defeating.”
Posted on: Sat, 20 Dec 2014 19:26:21 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015