Rational Or NOT?!

OK, if that last one on The Righteous Mind rang any bells, you really should read this one:

https://aeon.co/essays/we-are-more-rational-than-those-who-nudge-us

I have been stumbling along here reading a bunch of things in psychology and economics and culture and world views for about 15 years now. This piece cited above sums up about 5 books that I have found very interesting. Kahneman, and McCraney and Haidt, and Thaler.

The basic idea is that evolution has pretty much tuned us to be not quite rational. Oh, we have a brain, and that brain CAN stop and think about things, but mostly, it does not. And that is just fine - it works well. Just imagine walking into the supermarket and approaching the cereal aisle. You want to buy ONE box of cereal. If you were a purely rational animal, how long do you think that would take? Just think of the factors: cost, cost per unit, ingredients, health claims, packaging, etc. There are easily 4,000 choices in that one aisle. This could take a while - or NOT. For most of us, it is simple - I only want to spend 5 minutes at this max - good enough works just fine. It's called satisficing - an economist won the Nobel Prize for coming up with that idea for economic decisions.
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/satisficing.asp

And that is the case when we KNOW we are thinking and we intend to make a rational decision. When we are not even aware of how we are leaning, it takes a lot less time. When the lion appeared in your path in the jungle, you were moving even BEFORE your brain registered the thing. MOST of our responses are that kind - an instinctive reaction brought about by the wonderful pattern recognition software in our head that KNOWS and reacts before our brain can even process it. It takes you less than a second to make a judgement about someone else - but it takes your brain about 8 seconds for that to register, and it takes your thinking brain somewhat longer to do anything about it.

The best thing about this article is that he holds out hope that we can figure out how to improve on our fast brain for the things that really matter. He cites Keith E Stanovich, Rationality and the Reflective Mind, who is persuaded that we can do better as a society, by reflecting together in a more civil way. Part of our genius, from Haidt, is that we have these powerful motivators that enable us to act as a larger group, to accomplish amazing things. If we can empower that group effort, with more civil discussion and reflective reasoning - we might have a shot at moving forward here.

I'm working on it - how about you?