rational

We love to think of ourselves as deeply logical beings, since after all, we call ourselves Homo sapienswhich can be translated as the ‘man who thinks’. When we make a decision, from what car to buy to who to vote for, we like to believe we’ve weighed the pros and cons with the coolness of an algorithm. But biological reality acts as a bucket of cold water by pointing out that our mind has evolved to survivenot to think rationally. The myth of the logic machine. To understand why we sometimes make decisions that seem absurd or get carried away by cognitive biases, we must look to our evolutionary past. The classics of modern evolutionary psychology, driven by figures such as Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, established a fundamental basis when seeing that our current cognitive mechanisms were forged in ancestral environments. Here we must bear in mind that in the savanna, stopping to statistically calculate the probability that a rustling in the undergrowth was a lion or simply the wind was a recipe that could end with almost certain death. The one who survived was the one who ran away without thinking rationally. It is not exclusive. This decision-making architecture is not unique to us, since science has already traced the evolutionary roots of our decisions. comparing us with non-human primates. The result is that monkeys also display economic biases and irrationalities similar to ours, demonstrating that many of our logical “errors” are hardwired into our evolutionary lineage. Minimal effort. If we are not rational in the strict sense, what are we? This is where one of the most interesting concepts in recent cognitive science comes in, pointing to an idea that changes the way we see ourselves: “resource rationality.” According to this modelthe human mind is not irrational, but hyperefficient, since the brain consumes an enormous amount of energy and time is always limited. With this premise, what our mind does is optimize our decisions taking into account the limited resources available to it. This causes us to take mental shortcuts and make biases because processing all the information perfectly would be a slow and exhausting process. In other words, the brain prefers a quick, “good enough” decision that keeps us alive, over a logically perfect decision that leaves us paralyzed analyzing data. Think to justify ourselves. In a 2021 article published in American Psychologistit is argued that humans are not nearly as “rational” as we tend to believe, and they suggest that rationalization itself may be a human adaptation. Often, we do not use our intellect to arrive at objective truth, but rather to justify decisions we have already made emotionally or intuitively. In a complex social environment, having the ability to convince others, justify our behavior, and coordinate group action was much more useful for social survival than being a solitary, purely objective thinker. We are adapting. All of this does not mean that we have a “broken” mind, but rather that science suggests that our mental processes should be judged not by whether they comply with textbook laws of probability, but by how well they function in the real, physical environment in which we operate. In short, it is not that we are incapable of reasons but that human rationality is limited, contextual and tremendously practical. We were not designed by evolution to pass formal logic exams or to be perfect algorithms with no margin for error. We were designed to make decisions that, with the incomplete information and limited time we have, allow us to see a new dawn. Images | Wes Hicks In Xataka | We had always believed that evolution had been arrested for thousands of years. The redheads were telling us the opposite