Rational Thinking
Rationality is the quality or state of being rational that is, being based on or in accordance with clear thought, reason and logic. A rational person is someone who is sensible and is able to make decisions based on intelligent thinking rather than on emotion.
Humans are not rational by definition, but they can think and behave rationally or not, depending on whether they apply, explicitly or implicitly, the strategy of theoretical and practical rationality to the thoughts they accept and to the actions they perform.
Irrational behavior is usually undesirable, carrying a negative connotation. Instead of acting irrational, we tend to want to behave in ways that are predictable, sensible, and logical. This type of behavior is known as rational behavior. In this way, rational behavior is goal oriented.
In other words, rational comes from the Latin word "rationalis", meaning reasonable or logical. If you're rational, you do things based on logic, as opposed to impulse or whimsy. The original meaning in English was of something endowed with the ability to reason.
"I never made one of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking." Albert Einstein
It is impossible to be rational without being emotional. While emotions can overwhelm rationality, rationality cannot exist without emotions. Emotion can disrupt reasoning in certain circumstances, but without emotion there is no reasoning at all.
Most conventional economic theories are based on the assumption that all individuals taking part in an action or activity are behaving rationally.
Arguments may be logical if they are "conducted or assessed according to strict principles of validity", while they are rational according to the broader requirement that they are based on reason and knowledge. Logic and rationality have each been taken as fundamental concepts in philosophy.
A cognitive bias is a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment. Individuals create their own "subjective social reality" from their perception of the input. An individual's construction of social reality, not the objective input, may dictate their behavior in the social world. Thus, cognitive biases may sometimes lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, or what is broadly called irrationality.[
Another important factor is the memory of events in decision making. The mood someone has works as "a retrieval cue" whereby happy feelings make positive materials come to mind which in turn have great impact on the decisions that are made. The same is true of negative feelings.
Intuition is defined as the ability to acquire knowledge without the use of reason. Rational thinking is defined as the use of reason, the capacity to make sense of things, and the use of logic to establish and verify facts. Some liken rational thought to effortful or conscious thinking.
The definition of man as a rational animal was common in scholastical philosophy. Catholic Encyclopedia states that this definition means that "in the system of classification and definition shown in the 'Arbor Porphyriana', man is a substance, corporeal, living, sentient, and rational".
To determine what behavior is the most rational, one needs to make several key assumptions, and also needs a logical formulation of the problem. When the goal or problem involves making a decision, rationality factors in all information that is available (e.g. complete or incomplete knowledge). Collectively, the formulation and background assumptions are the model within which rationality applies.
Rationality is relative: if one accepts a model in which benefiting oneself is optimal, then rationality is equated with behavior that is self-interested to the point of being selfish; whereas if one accepts a model in which benefiting the group is optimal, then purely selfish behavior is deemed irrational. It is thus meaningless to assert rationality without also specifying the background model assumptions describing how the problem is framed and formulated.
"Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason." Oscar Wilde
What we need to understand by rationality is not very clear. The formal definition of Rational Expectations is, the subjective probability distribution regarding future reality inside the heads of economic actors coincides with the objective probability distribution operating outside their heads in reality.
It is believed by some philosophers, notably, A. C. Grayling, a British philosopher and author, that a good rationale must be independent of emotions, personal feelings or any kind of instincts. Any process of evaluation or analysis, that may be called rational, is expected to be highly objective, logical and "mechanical". If these minimum requirements are not satisfied i.e. if a person has been, even slightly, influenced by personal emotions, feelings, instincts, or culturally specific moral codes and norms, then the analysis may be termed irrational, due to the injection of subjective bias.
Modern cognitive science and neuroscience show that studying the role of emotion in mental function (including topics ranging from flashes of scientific insight to making future plans), that no human has ever satisfied this criterion, except perhaps a person with no effective feelings, for example an individual with a massively damaged amygdala or severe psychopathy. Thus, such an idealized form of rationality is best exemplified by computers, and not people. However, scholars may productively appeal to the idealization as a point of reference.
Within artificial intelligence, a rational agent is typically one that maximizes its expected utility, given its current knowledge. Utility is the usefulness of the consequences of its actions. The utility function is arbitrarily defined by the designer, but should be a function of "performance", which is the directly measurable consequences, such as winning or losing money.
In order to make a safe agent that plays defensively, a nonlinear function of performance is often desired, so that the reward for winning is lower than the punishment for losing. An agent might be rational within its own problem area, but finding the rational decision for arbitrarily complex problems is not practically possible. The rationality of human thought is a key problem in the psychology of reasoning.
There is an ongoing debate over the merits of using “rationality” in the study of international relations (IR). Some scholars hold it indispensable. Others are more critical. Still, the pervasive and persistent usage of "rationality" in political science and IR is beyond dispute.
Uriel Abulof a research fellow at Princeton University's LISD / Woodrow Wilson School and at the Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace, argues that rationality has become an "essentially contested concept," as its "proper use inevitably involves endless disputes."
"Rationality" remains ubiquitous in this field. Abulof finds that some 40% of all scholarly references to "foreign policy" allude to "rationality" and this ratio goes up to more than half of pertinent academic publications in the 2000s.
Many scientific ideas that are generally accepted by people today were formerly considered to be contrary to intuition and common sense. A counter-intuitive proposition is one that does not seem likely to be true when assessed using intuition, common sense, or gut feelings.
Scientifically discovered or mathematically proven objective truths are often called counter-intuitive when intuition, emotions, and other cognitive processes outside of deductive rationality interpret them to be wrong. However, the subjective nature of intuition limits the objectivity of what to call counter-intuitive because what is for one may be intuitive for another. This might occur in instances where intuition changes with knowledge. For instance, many aspects of quantum mechanics or general relativity may sound counter-intuitive to a layman, while they may be intuitive to a particle physicist.
Flawed intuitive understanding of a problem may lead to counterproductive behavior with undesirable outcomes. In some such cases, counter-intuitive policies may then produce a more desirable outcome. This can lead to conflicts between those who hold deontological and consequentialist ethical perspectives on those issues.
The term homo-economicus, or economic man, is the portrayal of humans as agents who are consistently rational, narrowly self-interested, and who pursue their subjectively-defined ends optimally. It is a word play on Homo sapiens, used in some economic theories and in pedagogy.
The principle of rationality was coined by Karl R. Popper in his Harvard Lecture of 1963:
“Principle, agents act in the most adequate way according to the objective situation. It is an idealized conception of human behavior which he used to drive his model of situational analysis.”
Food for thought!