Showing papers on "Rationality published in 2006"

Risk As Analysis and Risk As Feelings: Some Thoughts About Affect, Reason, Risk, and Rationality

Abstract: Modern theories in cognitive psychology and neuroscience indicate that there are two fundamental ways in which human beings comprehend risk. The analytic system uses algorithms and normative rules, such as probability calculus, formal logic, and risk assessment. It is relatively slow, effortful, and requires conscious control. The experiential system is intuitive, fast, mostly automatic, and not very accessible to conscious awareness. The experiential system enabled human beings to survive during their long period of evolution and remains today the most natural and most common way to respond to risk. It relies on images and associations, linked by experience to emotion and affect (a feeling that something is good or bad). This system represents risk as a feeling that tells us whether it's safe to walk down this dark street or drink this strange-smelling water. Proponents of formal risk analysis tend to view affective responses to risk as irrational. Current wisdom disputes this view. The rational and the experiential systems operate in parallel and each seems to depend on the other for guidance. Studies have demonstrated that analytic reasoning cannot be effective unless it is guided by emotion and affect. Rational decision making requires proper integration of both modes of thought. Both systems have their advantages, biases, and limitations. Now that we are beginning to understand the complex interplay between emotion and reason that is essential to rational behavior, the challenge before us is to think creatively about what this means for managing risk. On the one hand, how do we apply reason to temper the strong emotions engendered by some risk events? On the other hand, how do we infuse needed "doses of feeling" into circumstances where lack of experience may otherwise leave us too "coldly rational"? This article addresses these important questions.

Frames, biases, and rational decision-making in the human brain

Abstract: Human choices are remarkably susceptible to the manner in which options are presented. This so-called "framing effect" represents a striking violation of standard economic accounts of human rationality, although its underlying neurobiology is not understood. We found that the framing effect was specifically associated with amygdala activity, suggesting a key role for an emotional system in mediating decision biases. Moreover, across individuals, orbital and medial prefrontal cortex activity predicted a reduced susceptibility to the framing effect. This finding highlights the importance of incorporating emotional processes within models of human choice and suggests how the brain may modulate the effect of these biasing influences to approximate rationality.

Simon, Herbert A.

Abstract: Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001) was an American scientist whose research ranged broadly over the cognitive and social sciences, computer science, economics, and the philosophy of science. For his fundamental, innovative, and penetrating contributions he received the highest research awards in the fields of economics, psychology, computer science and artificial intelligence, including the 1978 Nobel Prize for Economics for his model of bounded rationality in decision-making and problem-solving. Keywords: decision-making; problem solving; artificial intelligence; bounded rationality; Nobel Price in Economics

Rationality, foolishness, and adaptive intelligence

Abstract: Technologies of model-based rationality are the core technologies of strategic management, having largely replaced earlier technologies that placed greater reliance on traditional practice or on communication either with the stars or with the gods. The technologies used by organizations in their pursuit of intelligence can be imagined to change over time as a result of responding to the successes and failures associated with the technologies. Although technologies of rationality seem clearly to be effective instruments of exploitation in relatively simple situations and to derive their adaptive advantage from those capabilities, their ventures in more complex explorations seem often to lead to huge mistakes and thus unlikely to be sustained by adaptive processes. Whether their survival as instruments of exploratory novelty in complex situations is desirable is a difficult question to answer, but it seems likely that any such survival may require hitchhiking on their successes in simpler worlds. Survival may also be served by the heroism of fools and the blindness of true believers. Their imperviousness to feedback is both the despair of adaptive intelligence and, conceivably, its salvation. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Substantive and Reflexive Elements in Modern Law

Abstract: The most comprehensive efforts to develop a new evolutionary approach to law are found in the work of Nonet and Selznick in the United States and Habermas and Luhmann in Germany. While these theorists are concerned with a common problem-the crisis of formal rationality of law-they differ drastically in their accounts of the problem and their vision of the future. This paper tries to resolve these differences by first decomposing and then restructuring the diverse neo-evolutionary models. Using a more comprehensive model of socio-legal covariation, the author identifies an emerging kind of legal structure which he calls reflexive law. Reflexive law is characterized by a new kind of legal self-restraint. Instead of taking over regulatory responsibility for the outcome of social processes, reflexive law restricts itself to the installation, correction, and redefinition of democratic self-regulatory mechanisms. The author identifies areas of private law in which reflexive solutions are arguably emerging, and he spells out the consequences which a concern for reflexivity has for a renewed sociological jurisprudence.

Governance to Governmentality: Analyzing NGOs, States, and Power

Abstract: Studies of global governance typically claim that the state has lost power to nonstate actors and that political authority is increasingly institutionalized in spheres not controlled by states. In this article, we challenge the core claims in the literature on global governance. Rather than focusing on the relative power of states and nonstate actors, we focus on the sociopolitical functions and processes of governance in their own right and seek to identify their rationality as practices of political rule. For this task, we use elements of the conception of power developed by Michel Foucault in his studies of “governmentality.” In this perspective, the role of nonstate actors in shaping and carrying out global governance-functions is not an instance of transfer of power from the state to nonstate actors but rather an expression of a changing logic or rationality of government (defined as a type of power) by which civil society is redefined from a passive object of government to be acted upon into an entity that is both an object and a subject of government. The argument is illustrated by two case studies: the international campaign to ban landmines, and international population policy. The cases show that the self-association and political will-formation characteristic of civil society and nonstate actors do not stand in opposition to the political power of the state, but is a most central feature of how power, understood as government, operates in late modern society.

Emotion and Rationality: A Critical Review and Interpretation of Empirical Evidence

Abstract: The relation between emotion and rationality is assessed by reviewing empirical findings from multiple disciplines. Two types of emotional phenomena are examined — incidental emotional states and integral emotional responses — and three conceptions of rationality are considered — logical, material, and ecological. Emotional states influence reasoning processes, are often misattributed to focal objects, distort beliefs in an assimilative fashion, disrupt self-control when intensely negative but do not necessarily increase risk-taking. Integral emotional responses are often used as proxies for values, and valuations based on these responses exhibit distinct properties: efficiency, consistency, polarization, myopia, scale- insensitivity, and reference-dependence. Emotions seem to promote social and moral behavior. Conjectures about the design features of the affective system that gives rise to these seeming sources of rationality or irrationality are proposed. Therefore, any categorical statement about the overall rationality or irrationality of emotion would be misleading.

Beyond Individual Choice: Teams and Frames in Game Theory

Abstract: Game theory is central to modern understandings of how people deal with problems of coordination and cooperation. Yet, ironically, it cannot give a straightforward explanation of some of the simplest forms of human coordination and cooperation — most famously, that people can use the apparently arbitrary features of “focal points” to solve coordination problems, and that people sometimes cooperate in “prisoner’s dilemmas.” Addressing a wide readership of economists, sociologists, psychologists, and philosophers, Michael Bacharach here proposes a revision of game theory that resolves these long-standing problems. In the classical tradition of game theory, Bacharach models human beings as rational actors, but he revises the standard definition of rationality to incorporate two major new ideas. He enlarges the model of a game so that it includes the ways agents describe to themselves (or “frame”) their decision problems. And he allows the possibility that people reason as members of groups (or “teams”), each taking herself to have reason to perform her component of the combination of actions that best achieves the group’s common goal. Bacharach shows that certain tendencies for individuals to engage in team reasoning are consistent with recent findings in social psychology and evolutionary biology. As the culmination of Bacharach’s long-standing program of pathbreaking work on the foundations of game theory, this book has been eagerly awaited. Following Bacharach’s premature death, Natalie Gold and Robert Sugden edited the unfinished work and added two substantial chapters that allow the book to be read as a coherent whole.

Strategic decision-making: Process perspectives

Abstract: This paper reviews the strategic decision-making process literature with respect to the synoptic formalism/political incrementalism debate. Procedural rationality is chosen as a representative of the synoptic formalism perspective; and both intuitive synthesis and political behaviour are employed as representatives of the political-incrementalism perspective. In this paper, the author discusses the theoretical underpinnings of these three process dimensions, as well as the key research efforts gathered together under each perspective. In conducting this review, a number of areas have been identified which could profitably be examined further, and a number of implications for managers will be highlighted and discussed.

Deleting 'irrational' responses from discrete choice experiments: a case of investigating or imposing preferences?

Abstract: Investigation of the 'rationality' of responses to discrete choice experiments (DCEs) has been a theme of research in health economics. Responses have been deleted from DCEs where they have been deemed by researchers to (a) be 'irrational', defined by such studies as failing tests for non-satiation, or (b) represent lexicographic preferences. This paper outlines a number of reasons why deleting responses from DCEs may be inappropriate after first reviewing the theory underpinning rationality, highlighting that the importance placed on rationality depends on the approach to consumer theory to which one ascribes. The aim of this paper is not to suggest that all preferences elicited via DCEs are rational. Instead, it is to suggest a number of reasons why it may not be the case that all preferences labelled as 'irrational' are indeed so. Hence, deleting responses may result in the removal of valid preferences; induce sample selection bias; and reduce the statistical efficiency and power of the estimated choice models. Further, evidence suggests random utility theory may be able to cope with such preferences. Finally, we discuss a number of implications for the design, implementation and interpretation of DCEs and recommend caution regarding the deletion of preferences from stated preference experiments.

Organization Studies and Epistemic Coloniality in Latin America: Thinking Otherness from the Margins:

Abstract: This paper discusses the current state of Organization Studies in Latin America, disclosing the epistemic coloniality that prevails in the region. Adopting an approach based on the recognition of the relevance of the geopolitical space as place of enunciation, the paper sustains the relevance of the ‘outside’ and ‘otherness’ to understand organizational realities in America Latina. The argument is developed in three sections. The first section establishes the main characteristic of the development of Organization Studies in Latin America as its tendency towards falsification and imitation of the knowledge generated in the Centre. The second section recognizes the role played by the term ‘organization’ as an artifice that facilitates the comparison of different realities through their structural variables, but also the inability of this term to recognize any reality that escapes instrumental rationality and the logic of the market. It also articulates the increasing importance of such a concept in the cont...

Extending the Bounds of Rationality: Evidence and Theories of Preferential Choice

Abstract: Most economists define rationality in terms of consistency principles. These principles place “bounds” on rationality—bounds that range from perfect consistency to weak stochastic transitivity. Several decades of research on preferential choice has demonstrated how and when people violate these bounds. Many of these violations are interconnected and reflect systematic behavioral principles. We discuss the robustness of the violations and review the theories that are able to predict them. We further discuss the adaptive functions of the violations. From this perspective, choices do more than reveal preferences; they also reflect subtle, yet often quite reasonable, dependencies on the environment.

Ecological Thinking: The Politics of Epistemic Location

Abstract: How could ecological thinking animate an epistemology capable of addressing feminist, multicultural, and other post-colonial concerns? Starting from an epistemological approach implicit in Rachel Carson's scientific practice, Lorraine Code elaborates the creative, restructuring resources of ecology for a theory of knowledge. She critiques the instrumental rationality, abstract individualism, and exploitation of people and places that western epistemologies of mastery have legitimated, to propose a politics of epistemic location, sensitive to the interplay of particularity and diversity, and focused on responsible epistemic practice. Drawing on ecological theory and practice, on naturalized epistemology, and on feminist and post-colonial theories, Code analyzes extended examples from developmental psychology, and from two "natural" institutions of knowledge production-medicine and law. These institutions lend themselves well to a reconfigured naturalism. They are, in practice, empirically-scientifically informed, specifically situated, and locally interpretive. With human subjects as their "objects" of knowledge, they invoke the responsibility requirements central to Code's larger project. This book discusses a wide range of literature in philosophy, social science, and ethico-political thought. Highly innovative, it will generate productive conversations in feminist theory, and in the ethics and politics of knowledge more broadly conceived.

Modeling the Psychology of Consumer and Firm Behavior with Behavioral Economics

Abstract: Marketing is an applied science that tries to explain and influence how firms and consumers behave in markets. Marketing models are usually applications of standard economic theories, which rely on strong assumptions of rationality of consumers and firms. Behavioral economics explores the implications of the limits of rationality, with the goal of making economic theories more plausible by explaining and predicting behavior more accurately while maintaining formal power. This article reviews six behavioral economics models that are useful to marketing. Three models generalize standard preference structures to allow for sensitivity to reference points and loss aversion, social preferences toward outcomes of others, and preference for instant gratification. The other three models generalize the concept of game-theoretic equilibrium, allowing decision makers to make mistakes, encounter limits on the depth of strategic thinking, and equilibrate by learning from feedback. The authors also discuss a sp...

Deep Difference: Diversity, Planning and Ethics

Abstract: The article suggests that planning's current sources of moral philosophy are no longer an entirely satisfactory guide on issues of ethical judgement in a context of deepening social difference and an increasingly hegemonic market rationality. A focus on process in planning and a relative neglect of product, together with the assumption that such processes can be guided by a universal set of deontological values shaped by the liberal tradition, are rendered particularly problematic in a world which is characterized by deepening social and economic differences and inequalities and by the aggressive promotion of neoliberal values by particular dominant nation-states. The notion of introducing values into deliberative processes is explored.

Terrorism: The relevance of the rational choice model

Abstract: Terrorism in general, and suicidal terrorism in particular, is popularly seen as "irra- tional," but many economists and political scientists argue otherwise. This paper distinguishes three different senses of irrationality: unresponsiveness to incentives, deviation from narrow self-interest, and failure of rational expectations. It concludes that an intermediate position on the rationality of terrorism is appropriate. The typical terrorist sympathizer deviates only slightly from homo economicus. But active terrorists arguably stray from narrow self-interest and rational expectations, and suicidal terrorists probably violate both. Deterrence remains a viable anti-terrorism strategy, but deviations from rational expectations increase the potential of persuasion and appeasement.

Philosophy of Technology: An Introduction

Abstract: Introduction. 1. Philosophy of Science and Technology. 2. What is technology? Defining or Characterizing Technology. 3. Technocracy. 4. Rationality, Technological Rationality, and Reason. 5. Phenomenology, Hermeneutics and Technology. 6. Technological Determinism. 7. Autonomous Technology. 8. Human Nature: Tool Making or Language?. 9. Women, Feminism and Technology. 10. Non-Western Technology and Local Knowledge. 11. Anti-Technology: Romanticism, Luddism and the Ecology Movement. 12. Social Constructionism and Actor Network Theory. Bibliography. Index.

Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality

Abstract: Introduction: Five Conceptions of Rationality PART ONE. TALKING WITH A TRADITION 1. Contexts I.

The Rationality of Fear: Political Opportunism and Ethnic Conflict

Abstract: The appeal to nation is made by politicians in terms of arguments about survival in which the fate of the individual depends on the fate of the group, and the role of the group and its leaders is protection. . . Fear of becoming a minority is exactly what is motivating the people to fight. (Woodward 1997, 5)

Joint Actions and Group Agents

Abstract: Joint action and group agency have emerged as focuses of attention in recent social theory and philosophy but they have rarely been connected with one another. The argument of this article is that whereas joint action involves people acting together to achieve any sort of result, group agency requires them to act together for the achievement of one result in particular: the construction of a centre of attitude and agency that satisfies the usual constraints of consistency and rationality in adequate measure. The main discovery in the recent theory of group agency is that this result is not easily achieved; no regular voting procedure will ensure, for example, that a group of individually consistent agents will display consistency in group judgments.

Robust political economy

Abstract: This paper introduces the idea of "robust political economy." In the context of po- litical economic systems, "robustness" refers to a political economic arrangement's ability to produce social welfare-enhancing outcomes in the face of deviations from ideal assumptions about individuals' motivations and information. Since standard assumptions about complete and perfect information, instantaneous market adjustment, perfect agent rationality, political actor benevolence, etc., rarely, if ever actually hold, a realistic picture and accurate assessment of the desirability of alternative political economic systems requires an analysis of alternative systems' robustness. The Mises-Hayek critique of socialism forms the foundation for inves- tigations of robustness that relax ideal informational assumptions. The Buchanan-Tullock public choice approach complements this foundation in forming the basis for investigations of robustness that relax ideal motivational assumptions.

Spatial rationalities: order, environment, evolution and government

Abstract: Drawing on Foucault's notions of governmentality and governmental rationality, this paper examines how urban spaces and subjects were problematized in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Various practices aiming to foster appropriate subjectivities and regulate troublesome behaviours are informed by ‘operative rationales’ that ascribe to qualities of environments and spaces causal effects on the conduct of subjects. Three forms of spatial rationality are identified—dispositional, generative and vitalist—and each is illustrated with an exemplary instance, in order to reveal the mobilization of spatial and environmental ‘truths’ in the government of individuals and populations. Les rationalites spatiales: ordre, environnement, evolution et gouvernement C'est a partir des notions de la gouvernementalite et de la rationalite gouvernementale que cet article propose une exploration de la problematisation des espaces et sujets urbains au dix-neuvieme et au debut du vingtieme siecle. De nombreuses prati...

Mechanisms of Hope: Maintaining the Dream of the Rational Organization

Abstract: Preface Chapter 1: The Dream of Rationality - Rationality as a form of intelligence - The rule about rationality - Rules for what we want, say, and do - A world of failure, reform, and hope Chapter 2: Organizations and Rational Reforms - The rational model and organizational practice - The rational model in presentations and intentions - Reforms - Reform as a threat to hope - Design and methods Chapter 3: Selling Rational Reforms - Two rational reforms - The rational as self-evident - Rationality for others - Selling principles - The irrelevance of experience - Presentation instead of practice - Principle and practice Chapter 4: Buying Rational Reform - An irrational buying process - A well known principle - Watering down and projection - Constructing an organization - Distancing from practices - Similarities between sellers and buyers Chapter 5: The Reception of Rational Reforms - The local edition of the rational principle - Application - system, meaning, and construction - A realistic model - Usefulness - A soft reception Chapter 6: Learning About Rationality - Continues Reforms - The reformers' experiences - Learning at E-city - Conclusion - continued reform - Learning Chapter 7: Learning to Hope - A model of experiential learning - Lack of information - Irrelevance of information - Learning about things other than the principle - Learning about causes: special factors and resistance - Hopeful learning - Learning about the rational principle - Thought or talk Chapter 8: A Public Debate - There is no alternative! - Watering down - Model characteristics rather than effects - The evasive practice - The principle is right and the practice is wrong - Preserving hope at a distance Chapter 9: The Mechanisms of Hope - Avoiding practice - Selection of practice - rationality at a distance in time and space - Interpreting everything for the best - Separating the world of ideas from the practical world - The Act of Hope - An application Chapter 10: The Intricacies of Hope - Introducing rationality with the help of irrationality - Hoe as outcome or cause - A culture of hope - Implications for reforms - Hopefulness and hopelessness References

Rationality, Foolishness and Adaptive Intelligence:

Abstract: This article explores recent changes in thinking about innovation by considering the recent work of two key thinkers: James March and Gary Hamel James March examines innovative product development

The new institutional economics and the theory of behaviour under uncertainty

Abstract: The new institutional economics (NIE) is diverse in terms of the theory of behaviour under uncertainty. Some views are close to neoclassical economics, but others are similar to those held by heterodox economists. Distinctions between procedural and substantive uncertainty, weak and strong uncertainty and ambiguity and fundamental uncertainty help to identify different approaches to uncertainty in NIE. Regarding the influence of institutions on economics behaviour, not all NIE focuses on institutions as constraints and takes individuals as given. The dominant views of rationality in NIE are standard neoclassical maximization and bounded rationality, but alternative notions have also been defended.

Between multitude and world-of-life: the criticism of Hardt and Negri on Habermas

Abstract: This article addresses the efforts of Habermas to continue the modern rationalistic project as well as the criticism of Hardt and Negri, for whom this project has become obsolete in post-modern times dominated by the so-called "Empire." It first analyses the criticism of Hardt and Negri on the Habermasian concept of rationality and praxis: there is no communicative reason (in contrast to strategic reason) that is not instrumentalised by the Empire. It then analyses the criticism of Hardt and Negri on the theory of Habermas on society: there is no world of life (in contrast to system) that is not possessed by the Empire. Finally, it analyses the criticism of Hardt and Negri on the notion Habermas developed of historic transformation: it is not the progress in institutions and the formal constitution that can provoke ruptures in history, but only the vital force of the multitude - the constituent power, articulated according to the material constitution of society.

What is This Thing Called Knowledge

Abstract: Part 1: What is Knowledge? 1. Some Preliminaries 2. The Value of Knowledge 3. Defining Knowledge 4. The Structure of Knowledge 5. Rationality 6. Virtues and Faculties Part 2: Where Does Knowledge Come From? 7. Perception 8. Testimony and Memory 9. A Priority and Inference 10. The Problem of Induction Part 3: Do We Know Anything At All? 11. Scepticism about Other Minds 12. Radical Scepticism 13. Truth and Objectivity. General Further Reading. Glossary. Index