Personal rationality

Rationality is often considered a good trait. After all in the age of reason and logic, rationality has to be top shelf. Nobel laureate Herbert Simon attempted to reign in the enthusiasm by suggesting that rationality is bounded or limited. He suggested that the cognitive abilities of humans are limited and humans are not really capable of optimal decisions but just satisfactory ones. Hidden behind this proposal is the assumption that rationality is a universal property and that optimal decisions are derivable.

An alternative to this view is that rationality is a personal construct and what was advanced as reason and logic are concepts applicable only to those who proposed them. Thus, rationality exists only in the mind of an individual who claims to be rational. Simon argued for bounded rationality because of the limits to information and cognitive capabilities of humans. But, it is possible that rationality is not a common currency that can be “bounded,” as such. At the limit, rationality is an individual’s attempt to justify her beliefs and biases. Thus, it is not that the organization or individual’s rationality is bounded but rather, it is personalized in such a way that it satisfies the entity’s desire to perpetuate its biases.

This has many implications for policy. In a fragmented world of rights and wrongs, lefts and conservatives, intellectuals and those less endowed, and the powerful and the impoverished, rationality is often used to separate people into buckets. Some argue that if one is not rational, according to the definition they advance, then it could even be considered a mental disease. They claim that a working human mind will be rational, that is follow reason and logic, and any deviation from this portends trouble. In a regime of exploding data, this comes down to a process in which those who claim to be rational propose what is rational based on whatever data is available to them or they chose to consider.

It has become easier to be rational, for all it requires is the consideration of convenient data and an assertion of superiority to one’s definition of rationality.