Humans are rational. Critically discuss the theoretical and empirical Essay

Humans are rational. Critically discuss the theoretical and empirical evidence from psychology for and against this assertion - Essay Example These biases, such as confirmation bias, anchoring, base rate neglect and overconfidence, make up the first section of this essay. The biases are present in behavioral economics, which dictates that humans will behave in a way that is efficient for them in an economic sense, and this makes up the second portion of this essay. There is some indication that humans can be rational when it comes to domain specific tasks – such as exposing cheating or enforcing social contracts. Because of this, more study should be done regarding other domain specific tasks to indicate if there are pockets of rationality in other domain specific areas. Moreover, there is considerable thought that the irrational nature that is detected on the tests could be the result of something other than irrationality at work – such as poorly worded tests, computational errors, incorrect norms being applied, or inattention of the participants. Therefore, it is possible that humans are not as irrational a s these tests might presume. This analysis makes up the third and last portion of this essay. Discussion Reasoning is a part of cognition, which is virtually wholly made up of using inference. There is some question of whether or not reasoning has a separate cognitive system unto itself, or whether or not it is merely a part of the whole of cognition (Manktelow & Chung, 2004, p. 66). That said, reasoning must be distinguished from intuition. The main difference between reason and intuition is that reasoning is done deliberately and consciously, while intuition springs forth from the mind in a spontaneous fashion, without effort or a conscious search (Kahneman, 2003, p. 1450). Thus, when a person is doing an income tax form, he is using reasoning; when that same person revolts at eating a piece of chocolate that is the shape of a cockroach, that person is working from intuition (Kahneman, 2003, p. 1450). Reasoning is a function that is only in the higher order beings, as there has be en no evidence that reasoning is present in animals or children who are pre-verbal (Mercier & Sperber, p. 3). There are three basic types of reasoning, according to Samuels et al. (2004). They are descriptive, which describes how humans actually reason; normative, which describes how humans should reason; and evaluative, which describes the difference between how humans actually reason and how they should reason. In other words, there is an assumed standard that has been established by the normative project, so researchers interested in the evaluative project are interested in finding out how actual reasoning fit the assumed standard (Samuels et al., 2004, p. 1). These are the bases of deciding whether humans are rational or irrational – does their reasoning fit what is normative? If this is the case, then rationality can be presumed, for this would mean that the individual is making decisions that benefit him or herself. There are a series of normative rules that prescribe h ow humans should behave. One of these is cancellation, which means that a human will eliminate â€Å"any state of the world that yields the same results, regardless of one’s choice† (Tverskey & Kahneman, 1986, p. s252). Cancellation is important because only one state will be realized, which makes it easy to evaluate the other options separately for each state. Transivity is another rule, which means that each option in an