Thanks to Dan Ariely, Richard Thaler, Daniel Kahneman, Daniel Pink and a host of other writers working on rationalizing theories about irrational behavior, we now have a cottage industry of journalists and consultants focussing on writing about how the smarter ‘rational’ people can use the ‘irrational’ to their advantage or how being ‘less than rational’ is okay.

The irony about a lot of the articles written on how or why ‘rational’ people fail is that most of these failures are indicative not of how rational faculties have failed, rather they are indicative of how just one instance of not rationally including a known irrational factor, can drive someone down the rathole of meaningless analysis.

Most of the peer reviewed research about irrationality is about building a rational framework for irrationality. Unfortunately, a lot of the ‘thought leadership’ published about irrational behavior conflates themes like creativity, innovation, data driven analysis etc into some kind of ‘ Give up your rational roots’ literature.

We are simply trying to rationalize irrationality, not make space for the irrational within our rational/irrational view of the world. Rational people will often co-opt the findings about irrationality and try to build the irrationality of other humans into their models. You can be a rational person only when you understand probabilities, unknown unknowns and known unknowns. For the irrational, there’s always some variant of the hypotheses of hope, faith and trust.