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Skip to main Skip to footer. Games Institute. Games Institute Research Spotlights Blog. However, despite understanding what it takes to be rational, people often prefer to be irrationally reasonable. In other words, people may use a different standard to figure out what to do than the standard of rational self-interest favored by economists and mainstream politicians.
The discovery that most people recognize reasonableness as a distinct and often preferred standard for judgment suggests an opportunity to enrich public discourse by framing more political messages in terms of reasonableness—by emphasizing civic, socially conscious rationales for those policies rather than solely emphasizing rationally self-interested considerations. For example, the British Columbia politicians who were promoting a carbon tax may have been more successful if they had emphasized how the tax was a way of fulfilling a responsibility to future generations rather than trying to convince voters that the tax would benefit their own finances.
Our work also casts decades of research in psychology and economics in a new light. We think that the idea of people being hopelessly irrational is misguided. Instead, our research indicates that people may choose to be irrational when their rational self-interest violates their preferred standard of reasonable conscious behavior. Our research contradicts such claims. The successful spread of the economic ideals of rational self-interest has not eliminated people's commitment to the reasonableness standard.
The distinction between rationality and reasonableness in moral philosophy and the law runs deep. Our research suggests it is also meaningful in daily life. Telling your parents to stay at a hotel instead of your guest room may be rational, but it isn't necessarily reasonable. Or, to paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, it is rational to strive for adapting the world to oneself, though it's unreasonable to do so.
The views expressed are those of the author s and are not necessarily those of Scientific American. Note: I spent a few minutes writing this comment thinking that there was a small different between your statement and my intention, and ultimately decided that there wasn't. We could make many fine distinctions in this cluster. To list several notions in this close region:. The last of these is similar to the concept of a person who is playing to win vs a scrub a person who sees overly clever strategies as a kind of cheating, but other than that, plays to win.
Another important concept is negitiability : that the decision-making process is open to scrutiny and adjustment by outsiders. This is similar to corrigibility , as well. So, should I seek for reasonableness or rationality to prevail, whenever the rational is outside the Overton window? My dilemma is that I find more pleasure on being rational, so rationality stands I should seek for rationality, whereas the reasonable thing to do would be to stand with reasonableness and shut up.
The point is: whenever I can't decide on one over the other, which criterion should I use to make the decission, since each seems to point towards itself? This is fun. In hindsight, writing a post about Rational vs Reasonable has the unfortunate effect of causing people to ask which is better and how to choose between them, as well as risking causing people to accuse people of being reasonable rather than rational and things of that nature.
There's a very general issue with "X vs Y" posts, which is that they make the distinction look contentious rather than merely useful. Brienne wrote about this in connection with her Ask Culture vs Guess Culture. A similar failure mode occurs when people debate epistemic vs instrumental rationality. As nyralech replied, the answer is to use what best serves your goals. The two are not opposed; nor are they allied; nor is it a balancing act between them.
Where being reasonable does not serve rationality, the Way opposes your reasonableness; where being reasonable does serve rationality the Way opposes your unreasonableness. The just-be-reasonable predicament occurs when in order to be seen as being reasonable you must do something irrational or non-optimal.
I'm sorry; re-reading my comment, I think it wasn't clear. I didn't intend to ask which is better, but to arise the following question: Is it possible that whenever I have to decide between rational or reasonable predominance, that decission entails an a-priori decission of one over the other, since each criterion might point towards itself?
By the way, I'm curious about the Way to which you are referring with a capital W. Is that something like rationality commandments?
It's something Eliezer talks about in some posts; I associate it mainly with The Twelve Virtues and this :. Some people, I suspect, may object that curiosity is an emotion and is therefore "not rational". I label an emotion as "not rational" if it rests on mistaken beliefs, or rather, on irrational epistemic conduct: "If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is hot, and it is cool, the Way opposes your fear. If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is cool, and it is hot, the Way opposes your calm.
If being reasonable is necessary to your goals, then it is already instrumentally rational to be reasonable. Rational vs Reasonable. Personal Blog.
New Comment. Here is a new empirical paper on folk conceptions of rationality and reasonableness: Normative theories of judgment either focus on rationality decontextualized preference maximization or reasonableness pragmatic balance of preferences and socially conscious norms. We show that laypeople view rationality as abstract and preference maximizing, simultaneously viewing reasonableness as sensitive to social context, as evidenced in spontaneous descriptions, social perceptions, and linguistic analyses of cultural products news, soap operas, legal opinions, and Google books.
Will the person receive what I've said well? Did I think about how they might react and shape my statement to make them react well, or did I just say things I wanted to say without consideration? Has my point been made in good faith, or am I searching for justifications? What do I really believe about what I just said?
A further comment: This kind of afterthought-based correction eventually trickles into the first-thought reasoning to some extent, because it alters the incentive structure you learn not to say things that you'll just end up correcting. Perhaps "Everyone has the right to listen to their own mind. Rational - based on reason or logic. More often used when the person does something without any reason or logic in mind.
The person going nude in the example above would also be considered irrational. Logical - more based on logic, but also based on sound reasoning. Example: Why is swimming nude in a public pool outlawed in most countries? Well, it is only logical because not everybody is comfortable seeing other people naked. In this example, 'logical' is a better word to use instead of 'rational' and 'reasonable'.
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