In Which I Blame My Ancient Monkey Brain, But Hopefully Not Yours

A recent LinkedIn post about some thoughts on human irrationality by Carsten Buschprompted a response from me, and then a little later thought led to a slightly more expanded version related to ethics in decision making and leadership.

In a nutshell, the issue addressed by Carsten is whether human behavior that is perceived as irrational should rightly be considered irrational after we know the context in which ostensibly irrational behaviors occurred.

I think actions will always make sense once we actually know the full context of the situation in which decisions are made, and that includes knowing the mental state of the decision maker — the information they possess, the reasoning process they used, and the preferences they have driving their choice of alternatives. I do think there are situations in which a person’s actions or decisions can be regarded as irrational, but I think most of those situations are mostly rare and likely pathological. Otherwise, we’re mostly dealing with problems of how we acquire information, innate biases that we can learn to recognize, or thinking processes that we can learn to improve, all of which we often unfortunately fail to address effectively. For myself, though, I’m inclined to blame the lingering effects of my ancient monkey brain trying to conserve energy in a resource constrained world.

There are probably at least five key situations that make human action look irrational. I’m sure there are more. Maybe others can contribute some more distinctions or disabuse me of some that I make here.

1. The report (or signal) we receive with regard to the situation at hand contains significantly less information than is required to make helpful decisions, so we act out of ignorance.
2. The report we receive is altered from its original content by noise before it reaches our senses, so we act out of confusion trying to make sense of unrelated information.
3. The report we receive is altered from its original content by noise in our senses, lack of mental clarity, or evolved innate biases, so we act out of distorted perceptions.
4. The logic we use to draw conclusions from the report we receive is invalid, so we act out of poor education with regard to the principles of clear thought or lack of motivation to avoid lazy thinking.
5. The decisions we make are incoherent with our stated values and preferences, implying either that we are actually irrational or that we have unstated preferences that we are unwilling to reveal or have not yet acknowledged.

In other words, although I’ll gladly blame my ancestors for my poor decision making, there are probably several reasons for our mental stumbles other than our current levels of evolved capacity for rational thought or mental health. (But, our inclination to assign irrationality to others may actually be due to certain inclinations that arise out of our current levels of evolved capacity for rational thought. How’s that for a strange loop?)

Once we recognize the sources of what can lead to apparent irrational actions, we ought to ask ourselves how we should address them in a mature and beneficial manner, assuming that we value behaving in mature and beneficial ways. I see two distinct classes of questions that need to be addressed, each of which naturally leads to more refined questions.

• How do we treat people that we believe are behaving irrationally, especially in cases where their actions either led to some kind of harm or can lead to harm? What questions should we ask about the cause of their behavior?
• How can we better design systems to limit the effects of any of those barriers to good decision making before and after decisions are made under their influence?