Rationally irrational

Yesterday in writing about my ideas regarding neurological reflexivity I highlighted the work of behavioural economists in demonstrating the weakness of the homo economicus model, or the myth of rational man. This is the idea that citizens with perfect knowledge will behave in a perfectly rational way.

Of course in the real world people do not have perfect information, but are often bemused by the flood of this imperfect information. Secondly, behavioural economists have pointed out the seemingly irrational nature of the decisions we make based on this partial (in both senses) information.

There has been a massive explosion in books on this field of study, the latest is by Dan Ariely discussed in today’s Guardian.

The relevance of this to my fundamental argument is that these economists are not focusing on what we think, but as I said yesterday, how we think. What are the psychological and neurological processes that affect our decisions? And that is why this field of study forms such an important component of my thinking on how we become better at dealing with the challenges of progress. By understanding our decision making processes, by recognising that they are not entirely rational as we would sometimes like to believe, we can begin to make better choices.

• 90196 - 05 Jun 2008 1:57pm

  Let us dispose of ‘reason’ as the prime mover of human behaviour. As Hume pointed out long ago, reason is but the servant of the emotions. If it plays any part at all in our decision making it is to provide an explanation or an excuse for our actions. Rather than looking ‘inward’ towards neurological processes, we should look outward to the experiences which force us to feel in certain ways. We are conditioned by our experiences of the natural and social world. Our experiences are limited, so we must rely on others to inform us. Like many other animals, we learn by imitation of the behaviour of other people. Thus, we participate in networks of others, mainly like-minded people. This limits our horizons – what we think significant about the world and how we behave in it. The engine for human behaviour is conversation, the exchange of ideas with others. From these interactions emerge new, higher order entities - let us call them ‘institutions’. These have different properties from the conversations which generated them – for example they are self-reproducing, each component conversation begets more conversations. Conversations and the institutions which emerge from them, take certain aspects of the world for granted, not to be discussed. But there are other aspects of the world which must be discussed, at least until there is a settled opinion when that conversation stops and its topic sinks from view into the ‘not to be discussed’ category and the conversations turn to other topics. The outcome of this line of research is that ‘institutions’ not only produce themselves from their own components (i.e. from conversations), but they are autonomous ‘living’ real-world entities which compete with each other to dominate human conversations and so ensure their own survival. Thus institutions are of a different natural order from the conversations from which they emerge and thus escape critical analysis. They are energised by human lifetime and survive by spreading their own particular conversations throughout human society. Just as the cell in the brain cannot know what the brain is thinking, so human conversations are inadequate to reflect on the activities of institutions. In their efforts to survive in the institutional environment, institutions have learned how to amplify conversations favourable to their own survival and to attenuate those that threaten them. These survival tactics of institutions, at the human level seen as propaganda, are reflected in the ‘rationality’ of human conversations about rival conversations. This is the deceptive role of reason about which much is written and so little understood. Custom and habit, imitation and incessant conversations drive individual humans to behave in certain ways and to explain their behaviour in terms understandable by others entrained in the same or similar institutional conversations. Examples of contemporary conversations that are firmly institutionalised are those of the arcane professions, such as accounting, the law and big science. Religions and superstitions, political rhetoric, the caring professions are more venerable institutions where even the most sceptical shy from questioning their taken-for-granted ‘truths’. I offer this as an alternative to the reductionist approach proposed in Matthew’s Blog. Fenton Robb

• Matthew Taylor - 05 Jun 2008 1:38pm

  Thanks Fenton, really interesting. I won't respond in detail to the content as I find myself broadly in agreeemnt. But please accept that I am not a reductionist. I am not advocating anything merely suggesting that we are moving into a time when how we think is given as much weight as what we think. This future contains possibilities but also perils. Neurological reductionism is one of the perils

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