Wednesday, December 26, 2012

[ftnivpfu] Optimism about optimality

Behavioral scientists and lay people easily produce many artificial scenarios and anecdotes of people behaving irrationally.  I've contributed.  However, just to cover both sides, consider the possibility that people, by and large, do behave rationally, choosing the optimal action, even for seemingly extremely difficult decisions.

The speculated mechanism is that social structures develop to aid rational decision making "in the real world", an aspect not captured in psychology experiments.  If so, irrationality happens only where such structures are inhibited from developing.

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