Rationality wars: epistemological boundaries and the limits of reductionism

Diverging from the discipline of homo economicus, behavioral public policy evolved from the ideas that humans are not infallibly rational and that gentle nudges could improve behavior. Progenitors of this new field included Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, whose decision-making insights in the 1970s led to a rich literature on heuristics. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein followed suit, their 1999 (2008) publication of Nudge escalating interest in behavioral public policy. Such interest was evidenced by Britain installing the Behavioural Insights Team (a.k.a. the Nudge Unit) in 2010, and the White House operating its own Social and Behavioral Science Team from 2015 to 2017. Within health, behavioral economics insights have influenced intervention and policy design, evaluation, and implementation across a range of consumer health behaviors, from health-insurance-plan selection to smoking cessation.In The Origins of Behavioural Public Policy, author Adam Oliver provides a succinct summary of the theoretical and conceptual frameworks underlying the application of behavioral economics to public policy, particularly health policy. As suggested by its title, the book outlines the foundations of behavioral economics, which principally stem from economics and psychology. Oliver then analyzes three types of behavioral economics interventions: nudges, shoves, and budges. Whereas most of Oliver's book is an up-to-date overview of familiar behavioral economics literature, he deftly closes by illustrating how insights from other disciplines, ranging from animal behavior to philosophy, contribute to behavioral public policy. A more accessible read than Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow (2011), Oliver's book succeeds in accommodating newcomers of behavioral economics. Intentionally brief and didactic, Oliver's book best functions as a teaching resource for undergraduate students or a handy reference for lay readers.A strength of the book is its organization, with its four main parts neatly mapping onto readers' different levels of knowledge and interest. Those new to behavioral economics should start at the beginning, as chapters 1 through 3 chronicle the origins of behavioral economics. In these chapters, we read first about the field of economics, with its dogmatic theories of rational choice and expected utility. Behavioral economics emerges from critiques of traditional economics axioms, with theorists motivated first to describe violations of expected utility theory and then to understand why people decide and behave the way they do. From Kahneman and Tversky's prospect theory (1979) to Maurice Allais's paradox (1990), behavioral economics became not only a viable alternative to economics but also a tool for policy makers overseeing irrational poleis.For readers looking to brush up on their behavioral economics basics, chapters 4 through 6 provide an apt summary. Oliver guides readers through hyperbolic discounting and present bias, gestalt characteristics and the James Dean effect, and motivational crowding and self-determination theory. He effectively embellishes these chapters with empirical investigations. For example, Volpp et al. (2008) demonstrated short-term success in motivating weight loss using precommitment deposit contracts and lottery incentives, which played on present bias, loss aversion, and the tendency to overweigh small probabilities (chap. 6).Public policy makers, analysts, and researchers with a foundational understanding of behavioral economics may consider diving directly into chapters 7 and 8. Contained in these chapters are applications, both conceptual and empirical, of behavioral economics insights to public policy, and a distinction among nudges, shoves, and budges. Influenced by liberal paternalism and conceived originally by Thaler and Sunstein (2008), nudges are characterized by being behaviorally informed, liberty preserving, and internalities targeted. Oliver expounds on how the British Behavioural Insights Team further specified the core attributes of nudges—including norms, defaults, and priming—which guide the team's intervention and policy designs. Whereas nudges are applications of a liberal paternalism framework, Oliver delineates shoves and budges as products of coercive paternalism. Shoves deviate from nudges by moving away from liberty preservation and toward regulation while budges not only prioritize regulation but also target negative externalities.Finally, readers yearning for new perspectives on behavioral economics will relish chapter 9. In this chapter, Oliver travels away from the behavioral economics canon to consider the potential contribution of reciprocity to public policy. In search of novel behavioral insights, Oliver explores reciprocity from the literatures of political economy (e.g., the ultimatum game) and animal behavior (e.g., chimpanzee cooperation). Although he offers little empirical evidence of policies using reciprocity, he proposes that reciprocity-motivating interventions might be effective in performance management and in domains linked with reputational concerns.Summing up his thoughts in chapter 10, Oliver makes three main arguments. First, and a recurring motif in his book, Oliver implores the field to expand by adopting multidisciplinary inputs that extend beyond economics and psychology, such as sociology, anthropology, and literature. This contention is reflected in Oliver's use of broad sources throughout his book, ranging from philosopher David Hume to primatologist Frans de Waal. Second, and perhaps the main justification for penning a book on the origins of behavioral public policy, Oliver believes that knowledge of the evolutionary explanations underlying behavioral economics phenomena will at once enhance our insights into why people often behave irrationally, and help us generalize behavioral economic findings across interventions. Last, Oliver convincingly argues for a paradigm shift in policy makers' goals from maximizing utility (the normative economics approach) to extending opportunities for people to lead fulfilling lives. This is more akin to Amartya Sen's capability approach (Sen 2014).At its conclusion, Oliver's book leaves us contemplating the role of behavioral economics in health policy. Here, we'll consider three: First, behavioral economics helps us understand how people make decisions, including deviations from rationality and how these deviations hinder utility or capability maximization. For example, anticipated feelings of regret or disappointment can explain why people make choices in gambles that violate expected utility theory (chap. 3). Second, behavioral economics informs intervention and policy design. For example, countries interested in increasing the number of organ donors may consider a prompted choice or opt-out system, as done in France and Portugal, as opposed to an opt-in default, like that in the US. These default differences result in nearly 100% organ donor participation in opt-out countries, versus 20% in opt-in countries (chap. 7). Third, behavioral economics helps us evaluate policy by accounting for effects that may be overlooked by standard economic analysis. For example, Chaloupka et al. (2015) found the US Food and Drug Administration overestimated consumer surplus loss from cigarette package graphic warning labels by ignoring the costs of smokers' biases, such as present bias and projection bias.Although behavioral economics has helped policy makers when traditional economics has fallen short, the discipline is not a panacea. In health and health care, data are mixed on whether behavioral economics interventions work or work better than those of classical economics. More research is needed to identify whether (and if so, which) behavioral economics interventions differentially impact population subgroups across varied domains. Additionally, some structural inequalities may need more than a nudge to move the needle. However, as Oliver shows, behavioral economics should be considered an invaluable tool for policy makers to design, evaluate, and critique policy.

Rationality Now!

Isaiah Berlin made a now classic distinction between negative and positive conceptions of freedom. In this book Yildiz Silier introduces a fresh way of looking at these conceptions and presents a new defence of the positive conception of freedom. Revealing how the internal debate between various versions of negative freedom give rise to hybrid conceptions of freedom which in turn are superseded by various versions of the positive conception of freedom, Silier concludes that Marx's concrete historical account of positive freedom resolves many of the key debates in this area and provides a fruitful framework to evaluate the freedoms and unfreedoms that are specific to capitalism. This book examines the thought of the paradigm thinkers in this debate, F.A. Hayek on negative freedom and T.H. Green on positive freedom and then ranges over the contributions to this debate made by both classical thinkers such as Kant, Hegel, and Marx, and those involved in contemporary debates on communitarianism, capitalism and self-determination, such as C. Taylor, D. Miller, F. Oppenheim and C.B. Macpherson.

There are two prominent viewpoints regarding the nature of rationality and how it should be evaluated in situations of interest: the traditional axiomatic approach and the newer ecological rationality. An obstacle to comparing and evaluating these seemingly opposite approaches is that they employ different language and formalisms, ask different questions, and are at different stages of development. I adapt a formal framework known as SCOP to address this problem by providing a comprehensive common framework in which both approaches may be defined and compared. The main result is that the axiomatic and ecological approaches are in far greater agreement on fundamental issues than has been appreciated; this is supported by a pair of theorems to the effect that they will make accordant rationality judgements when forced to evaluate the same situation. I conclude that ecological rationality has some subtle advantages, but that we should move past the issues currently dominating the discussion of rationality.

In March 2024, Daniel Kahneman – the man who did perhaps more than anyone else to shape the field of behavioural public policy – died. He is among a small handful of scholars who have had a huge effect on my own career, and in this essay – the first in a series of essays in a special section of the Journal that honour him – I reflect on how his work inspired much of my own.

Three approaches to the nature of human rationality are considered: Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky on decision making, David Hume on causation, and Peter Strawson on morality. All are seen as deploring the state of rational thought and despairing of the human capacity for logic. Their implicit model of the perfectly rational human is explored with the help of Mr. Spock and found to be of doubtful value considered in terms of evolutionary survival, where prejudgment is essential to decision making under stress. The glimmerings of this insight are found in Hume's therapeutic solution to his existential dilemma, and a general argument is made-with the help of side glances at prototype theory, linguistics, categorical thinking, and archetypes-that rationality cannot be equated with logic as generally understood but rather consists of a series of pragmatic prejudgments of reality that have stood the test of natural selection. This leads to a reconstruction of the idea of from a negative to a mildly positive attribute, with examples drawn from Charles Lamb and Paul Robeson, and hence to the conclusion that prejudice is not a warpedform of thought but that thought is a particular form of prejudice.

About the editors. About the contributors. Preface. Introduction: Critical Neuroscience: Between Lifeworld and Laboratory (Suparna Choudhury and Jan Slaby). Part I Motivations and Foundations. Chapter 1: Proposal for a Critical Neuroscience(Jan Slaby and Suparna Choudhury). Chapter 2: The Need for a Critical Neuroscience. From Neuroideology to Neurotechnology (Steven Rose). Chapter 3: Against First Nature. Critical Theory and Neuroscience (Martin Hartmann). Chapter 4: Scanning the Lifeworld: Toward a Critical Neuroscience of Action and Interaction (Shaun Gallagher). Part II Histories of the Brain. Chapter 5: Toys are Us. Models and Metaphors in Brain Science (Cornelius Borck). Chapter 6: The Neuromance of Cerebral History(Max Stadler). Chapter 7: Empathic Cruelty and the Origins of the Social Brain(Allan Young). Part III Neuroscience in Context: From Laboratory to Lifeworld. Chapter 8: Disrupting Images: Neuroscientific representations in the lives of psychiatric patients (Simon Cohn). Chapter 9: Critically Producing Brain Images of Mind(Joseph Dumit). Chapter 10: Radical Reductions. Neurophysiology, Politics, and Personhood in Russian Addiction Medicine(Eugene Raikhel). Chapter 11: Delirious Brain Chemistry and Controlled Culture: Exploring the Contextual Mediation of Drug Effects (Nicolas Langlitz). Part IV Situating the brain in context: from lifeworld back to laboratory? Chapter 12: Critical Neuroscience: From Neuroimaging to Tea Leaves in the Bottom of a Cup (Amir Raz). Chapter 13: The Salmon of Doubt: Six Months of Methodological Controversy within Social Neuroscience(Daniel Margulies). Chapter 14: Cultural Neuroscience as Critical Neuroscience in Practice(Joan Y. Chiao and Bobby K. Cheon). Part V Beyond neural correlates: Ecological approaches to psychiatry. Chapter 15: Re-Socializing Psychiatry: Critical Neuroscience and the Limits of Reductionism(Laurence J. Kirmayer and Ian Gold). Chapter 16: Are Mental Illnesses Diseases of the Brain?(Thomas Fuchs). Chapter 17: Are there neural correlates of depression?(Fernando Vidal and Francisco Ortega). Chapter 18: The Future of Critical Neuroscience (Laurence J. Kirmayer).

People often confuse intuition with a sixth sense or the arbitrary judgments of inept decision makers. In this book, Gerd Gigerenzer analyzes the war on intuition in the social sciences beginning with gendered perceptions of intuition as female, followed by opposition between biased intuition and logical rationality, popularized in two-system theories. Technological paternalism amplifies these views, arguing that human intuition should be replaced by perfect algorithms. In opposition to these beliefs, this book proposes that intuition is a form of unconscious intelligence based on years of experience that evolved to deal with uncertain and dynamic situations where logic and big data algorithms are of little benefit. Gigerenzer introduces the scientific study of intuition and shows that intuition is not irrational caprice but is instead based on smart heuristics. Researchers, students, and general readers with an interest in decision making, heuristics and biases, cognitive psychology, and behavioral public policy will benefit.

Disagreements about the plausibility of rationalist autonomy in bioethics are often attributable to misunderstandings about the nature of rationality. So, it is imperative to be clear about the understanding of rationality that one is invoking in one’s account of autonomy. This chapter makes some first steps in this regard, by drawing four key distinctions concerning the nature of rationality. The first, between theoretical and practical rationality, concerns the different norms of rationality governing beliefs and desires. The second, between real and apparent reasons, concerns whether our beliefs about our practical reasons map onto reason-giving facts that actually obtain. The third, between objectivism and subjectivism, concerns the fundamental source of our practical reasons. The fourth, between personal and impersonal reasons, concerns the different kinds of facts that can ground practical reasons. In outlining these distinctions, the author follows Derek Parfit in endorsing an objectivist account of reasons.

Rizzo and Whitman’s Escaping Paternalism (2019) is, at once, a scholarly treatise on the nature of rationality and a powerful critique of the use of behavioral insights to support a new paternalism in public policy. Since its recent publication, it has informed research, among other things, into the decision processes of paternalist policymakers (Ambuehl, Bernheim, and Ockenfels 2021), the implications of dynamic preferences for tax policy (Delmotte and Dold 2021), and alternative theoretical grounds for behavioral policymaking (Sunstein 2021; Sugden 2021; Rizzo and Whitman 2021). Its theoretical depth has far-reaching implications for methodological discussions within behavioral economics and the scope of government action beyond contemporary policy debates. We are very grateful to the editor of the Review of Behavioral Economics for hosting this critical interdisciplinary discussion of the book. In this introduction, we briefly review the key arguments from Escaping Paternalism and then summarize the contributions to the symposium. The diverse views expressed therein show that Rizzo and Whitman’s critique of the methodological robustness of behavioral biases and their proposal of a “paternalism-resisting framework” is stimulating, but not uncontroversial. This special issue is an invitation to further engage with Rizzo and Whitman’s arguments and, in doing so, advance both the methodological debate about key concepts in behavioral economics (such as rationality, biases, internalities, or welfare) and the normative debate about the implications of behavioral insights for policymaking.

Assessments of heuristic use as rational or irrational can only take place relative to background assumptions about the nature of rationality. Thus this chapter explores common-sense psychology’s (CP’s) understanding of rational decision-making. The chapter sketches two approaches—Classical Rational Choice and Bounded Rationality—and examines the status of heuristic decision-making within each model. In line with work by Gerd Gigerenzer, the instrumental value of heuristics is stressed, but it is argued that (on its own) this is insufficient for nullifying the challenges that heuristic use pose for CP. To see this, the chapter closes by considering the properties that are commonly taken to characterize heuristics, sketching the ‘Dual Process’ or ‘Two System’ approach endorsed by many advocates of the Heuristics and Biases programme. This framework makes clear that heuristic decision-making lies in opposition to the kind of logical processing of mental states where CP has its home.

How “nudges” by government can empower citizens without manipulating their preferences or exploiting their biases. We're all familiar with the idea of “nudging”—using behavioral mechanisms to encourage people to make certain choices—popularized by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein in their bestselling 2008 book Nudge. This approach, also known as “libertarian paternalism,” goes beyond typical programs that simply provide information and incentives; nudges can range from automatic enrollment in a pension plan to flu-shot scheduling. In Nudging, Riccardo Viale explores the evolution of nudging and proposes new approaches that would empower citizens without manipulating them paternalistically. He shows that we can use the tools of the behavioral sciences without abandoning the principle of conscious decision-making. Viale discusses the work of Herbert Simon, Gerd Gigerenzer, Daniel Kahneman, and Amos Tversky that laid the foundation of behavioral economics, describes how policy makers have sought to help people avoid bad decisions, offers examples of effective nudging, and considers how to nudge the nudgers. How can we tell good nudges from bad nudges? Viale explains that good nudges help us avoid bias and encourage deliberate decision making; bad nudges, on the other hand, use bias to nudge people unconsciously into unintentional behaviors. Bad nudges attempt to compel decisions based on economic rationality. Good nudges encourage decisions based on a pragmatic, adaptive, ecological kind of rationality. Policy makers should take note.

Heuristics are a central concept within strategy and organizational research. Herbert Simon is widely regarded as the father of heuristics research. Indeed, Simon identified heuristics as a useful way to solve problems. Heuristics are defined as cognitive shortcuts that enable individuals, groups, and organizations to simplify cognitive processing, conserve attention, and decide quickly. Heuristics can relate to single, one-off decisions like the choice to make a one-of-a-kind acquisition and to repeated decisions in processes like product innovation, strategy-making, and hiring. As such, heuristics differ from related constructs such as routines and improvisation in their degree of structure, cognitive engagement, and repeatability of outcomes. Heuristics are relevant for decision making by individuals, groups, and larger collectives. In strategy and organizational domains, heuristics are often core components of business models, part of the scaffolding of capabilities, relevant for a variety of important decisions, and broadly central to strategy and organizational effectiveness. Heuristics are even a necessity in uncertain and high-velocity environments. Yet while heuristics are typically efficient and often effective, they can also lead to poor results. This article reviews the three foundational research programs that focus on heuristics within strategy and organizational research. The “heuristics-and-biases” program is associated with Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, and others; the “fast-and-frugal” program is associated with Gerd Gigerenzer and colleagues; and the “simple-rules” program is associated with Kathleen Eisenhardt, Christopher Bingham, Don Sull, and others. The article includes their intellectual histories, key distinctions, typologies of heuristics, conceptions of performance, and potential future research avenues. Complementing recent literature reviews that develop integrative models that focus on commonality, aims of this article are: (a) to spotlight the unique insights of each program and (b) to crystallize their comparison.

This article delves into the intricate realm of human decision-making, examining how individuals navigate the spectrum of choices in their lives. Aristotle's insights are used to analyze the different forms of decision-making, from actions rooted in ignorance to those driven by moral force. The article also addresses the interplay between probability and decision-making, delving into concepts like risk aversion and expected utility. The work of researchers like Daniel Kahneman and Gerd Gigerenzer is examined, showcasing the psychological intricacies involved in decision-making, such as the influence of emotions and cognitive biases, and the concept of antifragility by Nassim Taleb (Kahneman, 2011; Gigerenzer, 2008; Taleb, 2012). The article concludes by discussing the concept of tacit knowledge and its role in decision-making, along with acknowledging the enduring relevance of historical thinkers' insights in shaping our understanding of choice and uncertainty.

The paper provides an overview of known heuristic techniques and different views on decision-making based on heuristics. We discuss heuristics of the “heuristics and biases” program introduced by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, and heuristics of the “fast and frugal heuristics” program developed by Gerd Gigerenzer and colleagues. We propose the idea that heuristics, being a natural instrument of human assessment, may be applied not only for the simplification of the decision process, but also in deliberate strategies without sufficiently reducing the complexity of a problem. In light of this, we give an overview of the Analytic Network Process methodology as a cognitive process. The Analytic Network Process is a descriptive psychophysical process developed by the mathematician, a distinguished University Professor at the University of Pittsburgh, Thomas L. Saaty in the 1980s, and it is used for large-scale, multi-criteria decision analysis. It represents the decision problem as a network structure with dependences and feedbacks between included criteria and alternatives. Whether applying heuristics may help to answer questions like “which of the two elements influence more”, pairwise comparisons of considered elements give more accurate answers on “how strong is this influence”. The aim of this article is to draw the attention of psychologists to the interdisciplinary research of the Analytic Network Process that has only been previously studied as a mathematical algorithm, and not as a cognitive process.