394. Rationality and heuristics

How could one still maintain, as economic theory did, that people make rational decisions?  Already long ago (in the work of Herbert Simon), theory took bounded rationality into account, but only in a limited sense. The idea was that the capacity for rational thought is limited, and should be used where priority is highest.

A distinction was made between substantive and procedural rationality. Procedurally, it is rational not to evaluate everything in a substantively rational mode. That makes sense and still applies. One encounters it again in Kahneman’s distinction between ‘system 1 and system 2’. The first is based on unreflected routines where one acts without conscious deliberation, while the second entails conscious, critical reflection.

Without routines, life would not be practically viable. Imagine that in walking, or driving a car, one must reflect on it. Then one would not have attention to where one needs to go, and why, and to talk with another passenger.

But there is more, as understood in more recent ‘behavioural economics’, which has adopted insights from social psychology, in the form of decision ‘heuristics’, shortcuts for fast decisions, which are procedurally but not substantively rational. Here is a survey of some of them.

The heuristic of ‘availability’ is that people pay attention to what is ‘available’, in the sense of forcing attention, being emotionally laden, as a threat or opportunity. That can go wrong, in an excess of impulse, neglecting less salient but still important issues, but it helps in setting the agenda for scarce attention. Also, the danger of routines is that they are also practised where they do not apply, and then emotion of danger or opportunity is needed to catapult one into critical awareness.

Another well-known heuristic is that of ‘loss aversion’: a perspective of loss (‘loss frame’) weighs more heavily than that of gain (’gain frame’). One goes to greater extremes of conduct to keep what one stands to lose than to gain what one does not yet have. In evolution, that contributed to adaptiveness: loss leads sooner to death or harm than gain does. This has a stabilising effect on relationships: the one who wants to break the relationship does it to gain, the other stands to lose, and will go to extremes to prevent it.

Another heuristic is to raise incidents tot the level of laws: ‘You always with your …..’, while it happened only once or twice. That is unreasonable, but can have survival value to respond in time to threats.

A fourth heuristic is that of ‘escalation of commitment’: the more loss one has incurred in a certain position, the more one commits to it, since ‘otherwise the losses would have been in vain’.  That is not rational: the past is water under the bridge and cannot be changed; one should look only at possible further losses in the future. That heuristic also works in favour of the continuation of a negative relationship. A classic example is that of George Bush, for whom it was difficult to withdraw from Irak, because then all the American deaths ‘would have been in vain’. It would also amount to an admission of having made a mistake, in entering. A new president, Obama was needed for withdrawal, and then he made the same mistake of increasing the commitment in Afghanistan.

A fifth heuristic is that of engaging only upon incremental deviations from existing policy, even if the initial position does not make sense, and a radical turnaround is needed.

A sixth is ‘cognitive dissonance’, where after a choice one only has attention for information that confirms that it was a good choice, not to what denies that. In a difficult to end relationship one only wants to hear the good things of the partner, and when one has broken the relationship only the bad things.