Irrationality summary

People make irrational decisions for a variety of reasons, and this tendency plagues both individuals and major organizations. In the case of individuals, people tend to distort their sense of reality in order to maintain irrational behavior and thoughts.

After making a decision, we often glorify our choice because we don’t want to admit the possibility of being wrong. Likewise, we tend to lower our opinion of the option we didn’t choose.

As you might know, you’re much more likely to be killed in a car accident than by a shark attack while swimming in the ocean. Even so, the 1975 movie premiere of Jaws, a film about a man-eating shark, caused a sharp drop in sea swimmers in California.

The frightened Californians were succumbing to something known as the availability error, wherein people irrationally ignore known facts and pay attention to information that makes the biggest impression on them, or that comes to mind most easily. In other words, what’s most directly “available.”

Conforming to social norms is often one of the most rational things you can do. For instance, it’s rational to conform to driving on the correct side of the street to avoid a car accident. But conforming to social norms can also produce irrational behavior.

For example, the psychologist Solomon Asch demonstrated that subjects make irrational choices simply to conform to what society expects. He did so by showing his test subjects two cards: the first one had one line on it and the second had the same line as well as two others, one considerably longer and the other shorter than the first line.

We all love rewards, and it might seem like giving them is a rational form of encouragement. But the exact opposite is true: while verbal praise might be a good motivator, since it can be internalized by the recipient and keep encouraging them for times to come, physical rewards are actually quite discouraging. In fact, rewards don’t actually make people perform better at all, and giving them is thus totally irrational.

In one experiment with students, the participants were asked to write headlines for their college newspaper. One group was paid while the other was not. In the end, the unpaid students wrote more headlines, showing that the incentive of a monetary reward produces worse performances.

It’s common for logic to be juxtaposed with emotions, and it’s thus of little surprise that the latter are strongly tied to irrational behavior. For instance, we might love our partner so much that we believe she’s the greatest person on the planet, or might avoid doctors because we’re terrified of finding out we’re sick. In short, emotions make us behave irrationally because they distort our worldview.

But emotions are different than feelings. We might feel cold or tired; on the other hand, emotions are a combination of certain feelings with our tendency to act and think in certain ways.

It wasn’t long ago that scientists couldn’t show a correlation between smoking and lung cancer. In fact, the connection between the two went unnoticed for centuries before the scientists Richard Doll and Richard Peto released certain statistics in the 1970s.

So, why did people fail to make this connection?

Whether the task at hand is properly assessing the size of a parking space, the time needed to boil an egg or the strengths of a prospective hire, our intuition can often prove incorrect. We tend to be overly confident in our judgments and our own gut feelings.

For instance, one study found that people who were 100 percent sure of their ability to spell certain words, actually only spelled 80 percent of them correctly. Another survey found that 95 percent of British drivers believed they were better than the average motorist, while most people think they’ll live longer than the average person.

So, you’ve seen how people are irrational in a variety of ways; but is rationality really so desirable?

Well, the truth is, being rational isn’t as important in the personal realm since your personal choices, like whether to have pasta or rice for dinner, aren’t especially important. And when they are more important, like when choosing a career, there are so many unknown factors that rationality only marginally increases the likelihood of a successful outcome.

While an understanding of statistics might help you make more rational decisions, especially when it comes to serious and complicated issues, it’s impractical to spend loads of time making calculations. So, here are some simpler ways to avoid irrationality.

One way is to know that the way a question is phrased can irrationally influence your response. For example, in one study, certain subjects were asked whether they’d rather save 200 people from an imaginary lethal disease, or attempt to save 600 people with a 33 percent likelihood of success. Another group was asked to choose between the risk of letting 600 people die with a probability of 67 percent that they would die, or letting 400 people die for sure.