The Myth of Rationality

Many years ago, I worked as a counsellor on a program that provided support to the families of sex offenders. In practice, that usually meant working with the wives of men convicted of child sexual offences. You might expect that my job would have consisted largely of helping these women work through their shock, horror and grief. That was certainly my expectation when I started working on the program. Yet that was almost never how it went. Instead I invariably found myself dealing with women deep in denial, either refusing to believe the evidence of their husbands’ crimes (the offenders, for their part, frequently continued to protest innocence to their families, even if they had pled guilty in court), or minimising the seriousness of the offences and deflecting blame onto the victims. My job was to dismantle that denial without losing the client – a delicate operation that often felt like trying to reel in a marlin with a cotton thread; the quiet voice of truth rarely had a chance against the roaring locomotive of self-deception.

My first instinct with such clients was to confront them with incontrovertible evidence. Yet I soon learned better: any attempt to force a reckoning with reality merely drove the client out the door. I slowly came to an important understanding: human beings do not construct their mental models of the world based on reason. Rather, we build our picture of reality according to complex emotional and social criteria, where truth frequently only counts to the extent that it forces itself upon us. I believe that my clients knew the truth at some deeper level, but another part of their minds calculated that it was a truth that came with too high a price tag, and did not allow it to penetrate into consciousness.

The idea that people are basically rational in their judgements and decisions is a legacy of the Enlightenment, the social and intellectual movement that dominated Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries. Enlightenment philosophy is still foundational to western society. Thinkers such as John Locke, Immanuel Kant and David Hume attempted to build a new concept of man (I use the word advisedly since women were emphatically not included) based on purely rational criteria. 

This movement can be seen as a direct reaction to the depredations of the Wars of Religion that swept Europe during the prior two centuries. Worn out by internecine conflicts and fundamentally sterile theological debates about the correct interpretation of scripture, Enlightenment thinkers tried to rebuild European society on a foundation of scientific reason, cleansed of the baggage of social and religious dogma. John Locke’s theory of the human mind as a tabula rasa, a blank slate without any innate ideas or tendencies, reflected this aspiration. If the mind of an infant was free of any prior imprint and could be moulded at will, then human society was also malleable and capable of being reconstructed in the image of Rational Man.

From this revolutionary idea came further revolutions: the French Revolution with its liberté, égalité, fraternité, the American Revolution with its “all men are created equal”, the Scientific Revolution and its offspring, the Industrial Revolution. It is the cornerstone of the great institution we now know as Western Liberal Democracy, which only a quarter of a century ago appeared to have vanquished all comers and even perhaps to have ushered in, in Frances Fukuyama’s now famous phrase, the “end of history”.

Now, of course, the picture looks very different. The first serious crack in the edifice of Western Liberalism appeared on September 11, 2001, when Islamist extremists managed to bring down the World Trade Center in New York, and to severely damage the Pentagon, symbols of Western financial and military might respectively. Their ideology was explicitly tribal, dogmatic and violently opposed to the values and aspirations of the Enlightenment – not merely irrational but anti-rational, since to reason was to question the word and will of Allah. Though the planned attacks on the White House and Capitol building failed, the recent insurrection by Trump supporters in Washington arguably achieved what Bin Laden failed to, inflicting serious damage on a key symbol of democracy even if the Capitol building itself remained standing. 

The New York Times described the rioters’ incursion as “Visigothic”, recalling the sacking of Rome in 476 AD. Some rioters even wore pelts and animal horns in a bizarre echo of those ancient Germanic raiders. The insurrectionists called for death to journalists, Democrats, and uncooperative Republicans, displayed anti-Semitic and fascist iconography, and assaulted black passers-by, yet jarringly respected Christian symbols; a rioter who tore down a placard with a biblical inscription in the garden of a black church was chastised by his fellows, even while they trashed a Black Lives Matter sign. The religion may be different, but in spirit the insurrectionists bore an uncanny resemblance to the militant Islamists who shocked America and the world in 2001. This is not yet the collapse of the West that Osama Bin Laden foresaw when he planned the 9-11 attacks, but it is nonetheless a disturbing manifestation of a rapidly fracturing society, and a reminder that the ostensibly rational human whom the Enlightenment birthed was always a fragile creation, if not an outright myth. 

In his bestselling book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari makes the case that the characteristic of the human species that most sets us apart from other animals is our capacity for large-scale cooperation, which in turn rests on our ability to create and believe in unifying “fictions” such as gods, countries, money, laws, value systems, corporations and so forth. Social cooperation is enabled by a shared set of such fictions, which, through common consent, acquire “inter-subjective” reality. A ten-dollar note is of little intrinsic worth, yet it acquires value through an essentially arbitrary common agreement. This perspective on humanity implies an important insight: to the extent that human survival depends on cooperation, the ability to believe in such arbitrary fictions must precede rational consideration. Our reality is first and foremost a social construct, not the product of reason, and it is inextricably linked to identity and group affiliation. 

In this light it is much easier to understand the believers in QAnon from whose ranks many of the insurrectionists were drawn. The idea that the world is run by a cult of Satan-worshipping paedophiles and Donald Trump is secretly poised to expose their evil plots – as the QAnon conspiracy theory claimed – is certainly irrational and bizarre. However it is no crazier than believing that human life is subject to the whims of a petty, squabbling bunch of invisible supernatural beings who inhabit Mount Olympus, or any number of other fantastical myths to which human societies have subscribed. The capacity to believe “six impossible things before breakfast” as the Red Queen did in “Alice in Wonderland” is core not only to human nature, but, at least if Noah Harari is correct, to human success.

In addition to the human tendency to absorb belief systems uncritically from our social milieu, modern cognitive science has revealed that human rationality is constrained by a host of distortions and biases. Some important such biases include: confirmation bias: the tendency to search for, focus on and remember information which confirms one’s preconceptions; the availability heuristic: the tendency to overestimate the likelihood of events based on how easy it is to recall instances of the event (for example, the wide reporting of plane crashes causing people to overestimate the danger of flying), anchoring: the tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information provided when making judgements or decisions; loss aversion: the tendency to weight losses more highly than equivalently sized gains; and so on. The full list extends into the hundreds.

These biases are not errors pure and simple, but rather cognitive rules of thumb which evolved to help us process information quickly and make rapid decisions. For example, it is easy to see how confirmation bias may be adaptive. It is probably more important for survival that people have a stable internal model of the world than for that model to be strictly correct. Confirmation bias would have prevented our ancestors from expending unnecessary energy revising their mental models and falling into maladaptive indecision and self-doubt, while also helping to maintain social cohesion.

This view of the human mind as a collection of more-or-less adaptive but error-prone information processing systems is a far cry from Locke’s tabula rasa. While a person can be educated to reason logically when required, it is very difficult to prevent the automatic activation of these evolved systems, which operate via completely different brain pathways from those active in logical thought. In this respect, cognitive biases are much like optical illusions: knowing about them can allow one to correct for them, but the illusion persists. 

In the case of the wives of sex offenders whom I worked with, however, the mechanism that caused reason to fail was different. “Denial” is the common term for this phenomenon. Psychologists call it “cognitive dissonance”, referring to the idea that when a person is confronted between a persistent mismatch, or dissonance, between their actions and their beliefs, they will try to resolve the conflict – usually by modifying their beliefs. In some sense we can regard these women’s false beliefs as rational if we look at the broader meaning of those beliefs in the context of their lives, instead of simply focusing on their truth content. Unconsciously they had made the calculation that the cost of leaving their husband, revising their entire view of their life and the meaning of their marriage, and coming to terms with their own failure to recognise their partner as a sexual predator was simply too high. It made more sense to believe in a lie than to suffer such upheaval. I could never succeed trying to sway them with facts or logic – I needed to address the unconscious calculus that caused them to choose the lie over the truth. In one case where I succeeded, it was through helping the client to recognise how strong and independent she had become while her husband had been in gaol. As her self-image changed and her sense of empowerment grew, the costs of denial began to outweigh the benefits, and she was finally able to accept the truth of her husband’s offending.

Numerous studies have shown how difficult it is to persuade people to change significant beliefs on the basis of evidence. The understanding that beliefs are functional aspects of people’s social and emotional lives, not simply disembodied repositories of factual propositions, makes it clear why. It is relatively easy to change a person’s beliefs using evidence if those beliefs are not meaningfully integrated into the person’s emotional life, self-concept and social identity. But that is rarely the case for beliefs that are worth changing. Changing someone’s views on climate change, for example, may have many disruptive impacts across that person’s life. Just to start with, it means accepting an uncertain and frightening future and potentially assuming new feelings of guilt about one’s lifestyle. If the person identifies with a social group for which climate denial is regarded as a marker of belonging, then the costs of change are raised even further. 

These understandings of how people form, maintain and change their beliefs, and the severe limitations they imply for human rationality, have important implications for how we address a host of important current issues, from climate change to combating internet misinformation. Educating people to understand and counteract cognitive biases is a good start, but is insufficient on its own. We need to understand the ways in which problematic beliefs are bound into the social and emotional lives of those who hold them, and address this entire context rather than relying solely on the power of evidence or rational persuasion. Of course, this is no small ask.

The internet has amplified the effects of social belief construction and cognitive biases, contributing to the dangerous political divide that currently exists between left and right. Prior to the internet, traditional media organisations needed to address themselves to a mainstream worldview somewhere around the political centre in order to maximise their audience. This in turn tended to moderate public views, influencing opinion toward the centre. The advent of social media has allowed people to selectively consume information from sources that reinforce their existing worldview, both reflecting and amplifying confirmation bias. At the same time, new online social groups have been created which reinforce conforming opinions with upvotes and likes, and punish dissenting views with ridicule and ostracism. This is no less true of the left than the right. In this environment, previously marginal views have managed to gain large followings, contributing to a breakdown of trust in mainstream media, science and politics. While a critical perspective on mainstream culture is potentially positive, a large proportion of the population succumbing to paranoid fantasy can lead nowhere good.

Right now, we stand at a critical historical inflection point. Ideological and social structures that have held sway since the Enlightenment are breaking down. What comes next? On the one hand, new understandings of human psychology and cognition offer the possibility of a kind of new Enlightenment, based not on the notion of the Rational Man, but rather on understanding, managing and ameliorating our fundamental irrationality. On the other hand the possibility of a catastrophic social regression caused by a collapse of trust in science and democracy cannot be ruled out. Rationality is not humanity’s natural condition. The extent to which we have succeeded in achieving it, individually and collectively, is a fragile and precious accomplishment that demands our vigilant protection.

This article features in Issue 66 of Dumbo Feather magazine, our Truth & Discernment issue. Get your copy here.