The Rationale of Irrationality

Suicide is the ultimate irrational act, as it brings no gain whatsoever to the person who executes it. And yet, more than 3000 people attempt suicide every day in the US[1]. They often do so because they believe they lost control over their life and they will never get it back.

Almost half of cancer survivors report having delayed seeking treatment even though they had the financial means to do so[2]. They noticed the first symptoms but feared that a doctor visit would provide a diagnosis that would start a series of painful events that might lead to chemotherapy and ultimately death. They feared that for the next months or years they would be stripped of control over their lives, so they decided not to act.

More than 1 billion people smoke, and about 6 million people die each year as a consequence of this habit[3]. From a scientific and rational point of view, smoking is an irrational behavior. It is very costly, both in terms of money and health. However, could we really say that 1 billion people are irrational? After all, most of them chose by themselves to smoke: for them, it was a rational act. Most people start smoking because of stress, economic pressure or personal problems: the feel they are about to lose control in one aspect of their life, and cigarettes are way to get some control back. Others start smoking to lose weight: they feel they lost control over their bodies. Others start to create different addictions: they lost control over their habits. Teenagers start smoking to look more mature (to look in control of their lives), to be like their friends (they fear of being excluded from the group, they fear of losing control over their social lives), to experiment or to affirm themselves (to affirm they are in control of their lives).

183 million people play the lottery each year in the US[4], and the poorest spend a significant share of their income on it (more than 5%). Research showed that they do so because they feel poor (they feel they are not in control of their life)[5]. However, in the long run, playing the lottery leads to a loss of money. It is an irrational behavior.

All the self-damaging behaviors described above share one key element: those performing them felt a loss of control over their lives. Could this be the cause of all irrational behavior?

Executives and managers receive hours of training each year. Nevertheless, many of them share the same weakness: they are unable to delegate effectively. Usually, it is not to because they do not know how to do it; instead, they do not want to do it. This is weird: delegation is supposed to benefit them, by leaving them with more time and energy to perform their tasks. However, managers often fail to delegate because they think that delegation might ultimately hurt them. For example, the delegated employee might succeed at his task: this would reveal that others are as good as the manager in the delegated tasks. The manager might feel less indispensable, and therefore fear to get fired. In another case, the delegated employee might fail at the task: the manager would get blamed or must respond for the poor results. Both cases would result in the manager ending up feeling less in control than before the delegation. This reasoning is what often causes otherwise gifted executives to fail at delegating.

With the previous examples, I showed how irrational behaviors originate out of a perceived loss of control. I will now reveal the second cause of irrational behavior: a drive to get back in control.

People get angry when they perceive a threat to their own identity. They become angry when someone does or say something that implies they are not who they believed they are. A restaurant owner might get angry to a client that just said something which would imply the owner is not a good owner. A father might get angry at the teacher who gave a bad mark to his daughter, because that would imply he has not been a good father. A husband might get angry at his mother in law’s invitation for lunch, because he would have to give up his afternoon playing golf (if he identified golf as an important part of his identity or if he identified himself with someone who only does what he wants). In all cases, people got angry because of an attack which would imply they are not in control of their lives. The angry reaction is a way to affirm that they are in control instead.

Sometimes, people do something irrational when they are very excited. Excitement almost always follows a surprise which resolves a previous unpleasant state. For example, a daughter might get excited and scream at the sight of her father who just got back after a long absence. The daughter felt without control (she could not do anything to get her father back), and now she is back in control (her father is finally here). Excitement is linked to the feeling of being back in control (or to the feeling of being more in control than previously).

Esther Perel said, about cheating: “When we seek the gaze of another, it is not always our partner we are turning away from, but the person we have ourselves became; and it isn’t so much that we are looking for another person, but for another self.” In other words, we cheat because we do not feel in control of our life anymore; cheating is our attempt to feel back in control.

From the examples shown so far, a concept becomes evident: we behave rationally to avoid a loss of control or to feel back in control. All the acts we call “irrational” are in reality a rational attempt to increase our sense of being in control of our own lives.

Are human rational creatures?

In the past, social scientists[6] used to portray humans as Homo Economicus, that is, rational and self-interested agents that attempts to maximize utility gain. Many current theories, instead, refuses the concept of humans as Homo Economicus based on experiments in which participants did not behave rationally. I will describe two of such experiments.

The first experiment[7] explored a concept called “Loss Aversion”, which states that people prefer to avoid losses then to acquire equivalent gains. Participants to the study were offered to toss a coin at the condition that they would lose $100 in case the coin would show tails or gain $150 in case the coin would show heads. The expected income in case of betting is $25, and $0 in case of not betting. Most participants refused to play, because they feared to lose money more than they liked to gain it. It is easy to conclude that human behave irrationally, because the participants did not make the rational decision: to bet, to maximize expected economic gain[8]. This conclusion assumes that the economic metric is the appropriate one to measure rationality.

In another experiment[9], participants were asked how much they should have been paid to perform given actions. Participants attributed a higher price to actions such as “sticking a sterile hypodermic needle into the arm of a child they did not know” respect to actions such as “sticking a sterile hypodermic needle into their own arm”. Haidt, the author of the book describing the experiment, concluded that humans are not Homines Economicus because a rational agent would prefer hurting some innocent person rather than himself. This conclusion assumes that metric measuring the avoidance of personal harm is the appropriate one to measure rationality.

When I read about the two experiments described above, I felt something was off. Rationality is the use of reason. Reason is the use of one’s cognition abilities. Following this syllogism, one behaves irrationally when he behaves without thinking. However, the subjects in the experiments were not rushed, emotionally disturbed, or otherwise deprived of their cognitive abilities. They had all the time they needed to think the question through before taking a decision. For them, their choice was rational. I find it arrogant to think they are wrong; more likely, they considered a trade-off the scientists did not consider. In other words, the subject was using a metric other than the economic or physical self-preservation ones the researchers considered. I propose that the metric we human beings try to rationally maximize is the feeling of being in control. Once rationality is defined as the maximization of the feeling of being in control of one’s life, then humans suddenly appear to always behave rationally. Foolishness is only a measure of distance of intellectual positions.

The first experiment (the coin toss) can be explained by the fact that a loss decreases our feeling of being in control more than how much a gain increases it. Participants tried to balance the control derived from money with the feeling of control derived from the experience of a gain or a loss. In other words, the currency they used in the calculations was not the Dollar, but the feeling of being in control.

In the second experiment, participants sticking the needle in someone else’s arm would have to deal with a strong feeling of guilt, which would remind them that they acted in contrast with their moral value of not harming innocent people: they acted out of control. The solution maximizing their feeling of being in control is to stick the needle in their own arm.

It can be said that subjects of both experiments acted rationally, as they acted to maximize the metric they were considering. Humans are indeed Homines Economicus, once the feeling of being in control is considered the currency for their “economic” choices[10].

As Nassim Nicholas Taleb noted[11], the fact that more suicides are caused by shame than by medical diagnoses is indicative of human preferences. We should not be surprised, then, that feeling in control is preferred to being in control and that avoidance of psychological harm is preferred to avoidance of physical harm.

The thesis I present in this chapter is that humans always act in such a way to maximize the feeling of being in control of their own lives. I call this the Control Heuristic. One feels in control of his own life when the expected emotional outcome of the future is positive. By “being in control of one’s life”, I mean the union of a set of concepts: acting coherently to one’s values, acting coherently with one’s previous choices, acting accordingly to one’s desires (conscious and unconscious ones), and acting in such a way that in one’s brain a positive emotion (and no negative one) is generated.

An important consequence of the Control Heuristic is that we do not do what is best for our conscious selves, we do what is best for our subconscious.

We act based on the expected emotional outcome of our actions, not based on the expected material outcome.

Acting coherently with one’s values and one’s previous choices is important because otherwise one might feel out of control: why else would he have acted incoherently? Seemingly, acting accordingly to one’s desires is important because otherwise one might feel out of control: why else would he have acted against his own desires, or accordingly to someone else’s? The drive to act in such a way that the positive emotion is generated in one’s brain is what we usually call “learning”.

I describe these concepts more in depth in my book.

The origin of the Control Heuristic

Since the first signs of civilization, the tribes where social collaborative behaviors emerged have been favored over the more individualistic one. In most tribes, those who exhibited too individualistic behaviors were quickly excluded[12]. Since thousands of years, having socially acceptable behavior has been crucial for survival. The Control Heuristic makes perfect sense for humans living in a society (whereas too often rationality is evaluated as if humans were individualistic creatures). In the next chapter, I will demonstrate that three elements contribute to our feeling of being in control of our own life: having enough resources to thrive (money, food, skill, etc.), feeling included in our social group, and adopting the behaviors of those people or stereotypes we admire. All those three elements are necessary for survival. The need to possess enough resources ensures that we adopt behaviors which are productive and beneficial to ourselves. The need to feel socially accepted makes sure that collaborative behaviors are chosen over individualistic ones; it ensures that no tribal interest is compromised in the pursuit of individualistic interest. The need to adopt the behaviors of those we admire, together with the fact that we admire those people who we think are in control of their own life, ensures that we learn from those who already understood how to satisfy their three psychological needs (in other words: we are programmed to admire those from whom we have the most to learn from).

We are all rational

We are all the same for we are all governed by a single overarching principle: the Control Heuristic. We only differ in our tastes on how to express it. The substance of everyone’s desire is the same, only their declination is different.

Most people define rational a behavior that is universally admissible. In reality, a behavior is rational if it benefits the self.

Notes:

Notes:

[1] American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, https://afsp.org/about-suicide/suicide-statistics/

[2] Tara Parker-Pope, The New York Times, 14th of May 2014

[3] World Health Organization, http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs339/en/

[4] https://www.onelotto.com/news/many-people-play-lottery/

[5] Jonah Lehrer, Wired.com, https://www.wired.com/2011/02/the-psychology-of-lotteries/

[6] E.g. Luce and Raiffa, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_economicus

[7] The experiment is described in Daniel Kahneman’s, “Thinking, Fast and Slow”.

[8] Some explanations such as Daniel Kahneman’s and Amos Tversky’s Prospect Theory have been formulated, referring to nonlinearities in the perception of future gain and losses

[9] The experiment is described in Haidt’s”The Righteous Mind”.

[10] Homo Economicus is not defined as the agent who pursues financial rewards, but as the agent who usually pursue their subjectively-defined ends optimally.

[11] Nassim Taleb, “The Bed of Procustes”

[12] Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind