ABSTRACT
The issue of human rationality has provoked contradictory responses within the field of psychology. Some investigators eschew the term rationality and the attendant philosophical debates about normative criteria for thinking and advocate a purely descriptive role for psychology. In contrast, other investigators embrace the philosophical disputes about the normative criteria for evaluating human thought and view empirical findings as a vital context for these debates. In this volume, I throw in my lot with the second group of investigators. I demonstrate that certain previously underutilized aspects of descriptive models of behavior have implications for the evaluation of the appropriateness of normative models of rational thought. Yet assessing the degree to which humans can be said to be responding rationally remains one of the most difficult tasks facing cognitive science. Traditionally, philosophers have been more comfortable analyzing the concept of rationality than have psychologists. Indeed, psychological work that purports to have implications for the evaluation of human rationality has been the subject of especially intense criticism (e.g., Cohen, 1981, 1986; Gigerenzer, 1991b, 1996a; Hilton, 1995; Kahneman, 1981; Kahneman & Tversky, 1983, 1996; Macdonald, 1986; Wetherick, 1995). It is no wonder that many psychologists give the concept a wide berth.
