Hot answers tagged rationality
23
There are two great TED talks that together help shed some light on your question:
David Deutsch (2005) "A new way to explain explanation", and
Richard Dawkins (2009) "Why the universe seems so strange"
At a fundamental level, science is about explanation (and sometimes using that explanation to make predictions). Thus, to most people, science is useless ...
12
I know 2 explanations to such seemingly irrational behaviour in cognitive science. Both of them don't really justify the usage of the simple reward-maximizing model in economics.
Rule Rationality versus Act Rationality
Act Rationality is the notion that every decision an agent makes is made in order to maximize his utility. Rule Rationality is the notion ...
9
Our subjective estimation of probability is affected by many irrational factors, one of which is the accessibility of exemplars (Availability Heuristic). Since we usually hear about lottery winners, and not so much about those who didn't win, we over-estimate the probability of winning. It may be similar with your estimation of the probability of the project ...
8
There is currently a lot of debate surrounding what questions Bayesian modeling is appropriate for answering within cognitive science, as well what makes a "poor model." Unfortunately these become extremely thorny issues very quickly, partly because what is called "bayesian modeling" actually refers to a rather heterogeneous set of approaches and ...
8
Ben Brocka makes many fine points. Insanity is a legal definition and what constitutes insanity will vary state to state, even jurisdiction to jurisdiction. What makes sanity so hard to quantify is the fact that so often, in a forensic setting, it comes down to the discretion of a jury of one's peers or the Court to accept or deny insanity as an explanation ...
8
Sanity is an explicit legal definition. It is generally not a psychological term. This is Wikipedia's definition of Sanity which aligns perfectly to my understanding of abnormal psychology. (emphasis mine):
In criminal and mental health law, sanity is a legal term denoting that an individual is of sound mind and therefore can bear legal responsibility ...
7
@OfriRaviv provided a great answer, but I thought I'd add a third alternative I am aware of for completeness.
The Tversky & Shafir result is only a violation of classical probability. This approach to probability usually goes unquestioned (since people often assume classical logic is the only reasonable logic), but could be put under scientific ...
5
The probability of conjunctive events (all six tosses are heads) are overestimated, relative to a single event of similar overall probability.
This result has been shown by Paul Slovic, in an experiment that is described in its abstract as follows:
This study examined the effects on the attractiveness of a gamble, of manipulating the number and ...
5
I believe these questions are dealt with by "support theory," the seminal publications being:
Tversky, A., & Koehler, D. J. (1994). Support theory: A nonextensional representation of subjective probability. Psychological Review, 101(4), 547-566.
Rottenstreich, Y., & Tversky, A. (1997). Unpacking, repacking, and anchoring: advances in support ...
5
Decision-making or decision theory is its own subdiscipline under cognitive science (also often studied by statisticians, philosophers, economists, and faculty in business schools). Within this discipline, understanding how stress affects your behavior is very important and not understudied area. For a recent survey with a neurobiological focus, see:
...
5
Your question is predicated on the assumption that Bayesian modeling has been successful in all domains. I think this is a stance that many (except hardened Bayesians) would disagree with. For instance, consider the classic Tversky & Shafir experiments on the violation of the sure thing principle:
What are popular rationalist responses to Tversky & ...
5
The prospect theory works/describes two stages in decision making under risk*.
Stage 1:
Clustering/grouping of the outcomes based on some heuristic. i.e the group the possible outcomes into groups and then choose a reference point out of these.
Stage 2:
Now they switch to the expected utility theory,and act as a rational agent that makes a decision ...
4
@CHCH has provided a good broad overview, but I thought I would also append some specific experiments that are considered to be a weakness of Bayesian models. The whole theme of this answer is an extension of Tversky and Kahneman's program of rationality-violation. All of these experiments can be fitted by some Bayesian-ish just-so model of the sort Bowers ...
3
Relationship between study time and performance
Plant et al (2004) review the literature of studies that have correlated average time spent studying and variables such as GPA. They report a couple of correlational studies in the literature that found small positive correlations (e.g., $r=.18, r=.23$). They make two main points: (a) academic performance is ...
3
The growing body of research in cognitive psychology is pointing to the fact that we may have overemphasized the processes of the brain as the center for determination of action. We tend to look at the brain in terms of top-down processes but this is far from the case. If you really want a rich and entertaining view of motivation read Damasio's book ...
2
One reason for different outcomes in the 2 cases you highlight may be due to the different regulatory focus (higgins).
Not letting project go scrap is a preventive focus and as such comes with all the baggage that preventive regulatory focus has. One basically wants to avoid an undesired outcome and sees things as loss-nonloss (see the relation with ...
2
Yes! Of course fear can be rational, especially when there is in fact a big scary monster and you are in danger.
There is an unfortunate meme in society that emotions and rationality are incompatible, but that's not the case. Emotions can only be irrational if you are mistaken to feel those emotions in that context.
Cases where fear is irrational ...
1
In a paper published recently (actually, today) by myself and my 2 advisers, we analyze results of an auditory perceptual discrimination task, and show that the Bayesian model can be used to explain some aspects of behaviour, but not others. We provide a simple heuristic model that accounts for a wider range of phenomena in that task, such as the imperfect ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
