Rationality

Rationality may be the most contested concept in all of the social and human sciences. Since the European Enlightenment, it has been a primary normative goal of humankind. The empirical view of humans as rational creatures has justified setting us apart from other species, even as it has served as the cornerstone for the most elaborated theories of human behavior. Attempts to cure irrationality have been at the heart of the development of psychology and the goals of social institutions. The attempts to define rational behavior and the question of under what circumstances humans exhibit it have been central to debates among and within the major social science disciplines. Meanwhile, chronicling the folly of man's attempts to act rationally is regularly explored in the humanities. Understanding rationality has even been a key driver in the attempt to use natural science (in the form of neurobiology) to put social science on a firmer basis.

This central role has often brought controversy more than it has led to cumulative theory or research. Whether and in what way man is rational is a central question of philosophy, but it is also the basis for social science, as it defines the way that people will react to others and their environment. The conventional wisdom on the connection of rationality to human nature differs dramatically by discipline. In economics, a purely rational man is often assumed and said to imply self-interested action for personal gain. Though sometimes used as a close approximation rather than a cognitive theory, the assumption of rational man allows the mathematical tractability for the great aggregate theories of social life that drive the creation of the market economy. In sociology, scholars say that people are driven by conformity to social norms about acceptable behavior and react to their position in society. This view is either offered as an alternative to rational man or established as an alternate definition of rationality. In anthropology, rationality is either a Western construct designed to impose our form of knowledge generation on others or a term wide enough to encompass all forms of human learning. In psychology, rationality is either an ideal type of behavior that we should emulate and intervene to create or, instead, one theory of cognition that can be updated or discarded with current knowledge of the brain.

Part of the cause of the wide variety of uses of the word rationality is a lack of clarity about the purpose of invoking it. In psychology and the cognitive sciences, researchers are typically trying to describe the mechanisms of human thinking and the patterns of behavior that arise as a result of cognition. A rational decision-making model may serve as a basis for comparison. In philosophy and the applied social sciences, in contrast, the goals are often normative. There are rational options, and we seek to explain how to find them. In economics, political science, anthropology, and sociology, the cognitive process and the manner of decision making are not the primary object of [Page 792]study. Assumptions about how humans will act allow scholars to build aggregated theories of how humans will act in society, given their interactions with others making similar decisions and the environment in which they interact. To assist theory development, scholars use simplified models of individual decision making and then ask whether models based on rationality best predict the development of social life when compared to other models of human behavior.

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