ABSTRACT
Are people rational or are they irrational? Before starting to write this chapter I posed this question to an undergraduate class in cognitive psychology. No shortage of evidence was offered for either alternative. On the one hand, it was pointed out that people do many things that most of us would judge irrational: We fail to wear seat belts while knowing that this decreases our safety, we smoke cigarettes while knowing that this may lead to a frightful disease, we spend the weekend drinking at parties while knowing that an exam is being given on Monday, we continue to use our credit cards while knowing that we are unable to repay the debts already accumulated. On the other hand, people do many things that reflect a rational nature: We plan for the future, anticipating the effects of our actions; we have created mathematics, formal logic, complex engineering and computing systems, high technology, science, and philosophy. Ironically, our apparently most rational accomplishments can lead to the most irrational results; for example, modern physics has provided for the development of weapons that threaten to bring about our extinction. For me, the tenor of the discussion was captured when one student posed the
popular rhetorical protasis, “If we can put a man on the moon,” and another student provided the apodosis, “why can’t we solve the THOG problem or the selection task?”
