Rationality

About: Rationality is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 20459 publications have been published within this topic receiving 617787 citations.

From ‘Miracle’ to ‘Cronyism’: Explaining the Great Asian Slump

Abstract: Explanations are about the only thing not in short supply in the Asian crisis. For all their diversity they can be collapsed into two ‘meta’ interpretations reflecting deeper differences in beliefs about rationality and markets. Those whose world view emphasizes rationality, self-adjusting markets, and market failure as exceptional except when governments introduce distortions, tend to see the crisis as the result of rational calculations in a situation of market-distorting government interventions and institutional weaknesses in Asian economies. Those whose world view stresses non-rationality (or a different kind of rationality than that assumed by neoclassical theory), routine failure of well-working markets, and the need for government interventions to modify market outcomes, tend to see it as the result of non-rational calculations in under-regulated financial markets, both national and international.

The Impact of a Presidential Debate on Voter Rationality

Abstract: This study evaluates the impact of the first presidential debate of 1976 on the rationality of voting decisions. Using data from a panel of eligible voters in Williamsburg-James City County, Virginia, three models of attitude consistency are tested: rational voting, selective perception, and persuasion. Rational voting is defined as choosing a candidate on the basis of issue positions. The debate increased voter awareness of Ford's and Carter's positions on the issue of unemployment, one of the key issues in the debate. However, there is no evidence of changes in candidate preference based on this issue. There is strong evidence of persuasion: voters adopted the position taken by their preferred candidate.

The Sexual Metaphor

Abstract: Give the little boy a gun; offer the little girl a doll: how many years of feminism would it take to uncover the meaning behind such assumptions? After decades of attacks on intractable sexual stereotypes, the time is right to ask what makes them so compelling and resistant to change. In The Sexual Metaphor; Helen Haste does just that, exposing the deep cultural roots of our insistent distinctions between masculine and feminine. To understand changing sexual roles, Haste suggests that we recognize the role that gender plays in how we make sense of the world, particularly through the use of metaphor. As she demonstrates, the assault on traditional conceptions of gender is in fact a confrontation with the metaphor of dualism, or polarity, that underlies Western culture, informing our models of rationality and control. Here our anxieties about our own masculinity or femininity encounter a cultural tangle of opposites - public and private, order and chaos, thinking and feeling, active and passive, hard and soft, positive and negative. Drawing on research in the fields of sociology, anthropology, the history of science, paleontology, and philosophy, as well as her own field of psychology, Haste demonstrates the pervasiveness of the metaphor of dualism in large areas of our lives and our thinking, and of metaphor itself as a mode of thought expressing theories about the world in science and popular culture. Her work, accessible to social scientists and general readers alike, is a stimulating tour of the dark, divided territory that is the backdrop for our organization of everyday experience, society, and sexual identity.

Rationality In An Uncertain World: Essays In The Cognitive Science Of Human Understanding

Abstract: Book synopsis: This book brings together an influential sequence of papers that argue for a radical re-conceptualisation of the psychology of inference, and of cognitive science more generally. The papers demonstrate that the thesis that logic provides the basis of human inference is central to much cognitive science, although the commitment to this view is often implicit. They then note that almost all human inference is uncertain, whereas logic is the calculus of certain inference. This mismatch means that logic is not the appropriate model for human thought. Oaksford and Chater's argument draws on research in computer science, artificial intelligence and philosophy of science, in addition to experimental psychology. The authors propose that probability theory, the calculus of uncertain inference, provides a more appropriate model for human thought. They show how a probabilistic account can provide detailed explanations of experimental data on Wason's selection task, which many have viewed as providing a paradigmatic demonstration of human irrationality. Oaksford and Chater show that people's behaviour appears irrational only from a logical point of view, whereas it is entirely rational from a probabilistic perspective. The shift to a probabilistic framework for human inference has significant implications for the psychology of reasoning, cognitive science more generally, and forour picture of ourselves as rational agents.

Thinking about Tax

Abstract: Behavioral economics and cognitive psychology have demonstrated that people deviate from ideal precepts of rationality in many settings, showing inconsistent judgment in the face of framing and other formal manipulations of the presentation of problems. This article summarizes the finding of original experiments about subjects' perceptions of aspects of tax-law design and argues for the relevance of behavioral perspectives to the understanding and improvement of real-world fiscal systems. We show that in evaluating tax systems, subjects are vulnerable to a wide range of heuristics and biases, leading to inconsistent judgment and evaluation. The prevalence of these biases suggests that there is room for skillful politicians to manipulate public opinion, and that tax-system design can be volatile on account of the possibility of eliciting preference reversals through purely formal rhetorical means. More troubling, the findings suggest a likely and persistent wedge between observed and optimal public finance systems.