Ending the Rationality Wars How to Make Disputes about Human Rationality Disappear

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the two opposing sides of the current rationality wars with the “heuristics and biases” researchers on the one hand, and the evolutionary psychologists on the other. The former group cites decades of evidence that people have systematic deviations from rationality, as evidenced by their performance on certain types of formal reasoning tasks. The latter group asserts the implausibility of the human architecture evolving with an inaccurate sense of probability and offers evidence that a representation of various formal problems in more ecologically valid forms makes the so-called irrational response patterns disappear. It is argued that the illusion that evolutionary psychology and the heuristics and biases tradition have a deep disagreement about how rational human beings are should disappear. This is not to say, however, that there are no genuine disagreements between these two research programs.

Théories à processus duaux et théories de l’éducation : le cas de l’enseignement de la pensée critique et de la logique

“…4 Nous parlons ici de la psychologie évolutionniste en général, et non de la seule « école » autour de Cosmides et de Tooby (voir Marcus, 2008 : 6-9;Stanovich, 2004 : chapitre 5). 5 Ceci suggère, comme le défendent Samuels, Stich et Bishop (2002), que la différence entre une position comme celle de Stanovich et une position comme celle de Gigerenzer n'est pas si importante : c'est principalement une différence d'emphase. 6 Les illusions d'optique permettent d'illustrer cette idée : bien que nous sachions qu'une image est une illusion, nous continuons tout de même de percevoir cette illusion.…”

Formal and Empirical Methods in Philosophy of Science

“…The phenomenon prompted an enormous amount of research work in psychology and beyond, like many others achievements from Tversky and Kahneman's research programme, which readily and steadily attracted interest from philosophers (Levi 1985;Stich 1990;Samuels, Stich and Bishop 2002) and also established the new interdisciplinary field of behavioural economics (Camerer, Loewenstein and Rabin 2003).…”

Disclosure and rationality: Comparative risk information and decision-making about prevention

“…Evaluating this response requires assessing whether the rationality of a decision is determined by the process of decision-making or the outcome [10,24]. In short, the defense of (P) considered here depends on seeing rationality as based on an evaluation of the process, where a fully rational decision is one where the individual understands the relevant outcomes, probabilities, and utilities, and then uses them to calculate and maximize expected utility.…”

“…Research has shown that humans perceive risk and choose actions in ways that rarely conform to the strict standards assumed by the Standard Picture [10,24]. As mentioned in the discussion of the dual representation model above, individuals appear to make decisions partly based on their general sense of the significance of the risk, separate from any quantitative representation of its magnitude [3,5,7].…”

“…As mentioned in the discussion of the dual representation model above, individuals appear to make decisions partly based on their general sense of the significance of the risk, separate from any quantitative representation of its magnitude [3,5,7]. In addition, evidence concerning heuristics and biases of human thought and evolutionary psychology suggest that people reason in a variety of ways that do not match the Standard Picture [10,24].…”