Great Rationality Debate

The Rationality Debate—also called the Great Rationality Debate—is the question of whether humans are rational or not. This issue is a topic in the study of cognition and is important in fields such as economics where it is relevant to the theories of market efficiency.

The idea that man is a rational animal is commonly attributed to Aristotle.

Many studies in experimental psychology have shown that humans often reason in a way that is inaccurate or imperfect—that they do not naturally chose the ideal method or solution.[1] An example of a problem which causes difficulty and debate is the St. Petersburg paradox.[2] This is a lottery which is constructed so that the expected value is infinite but unlikely so that most people will not pay a large fee to play. Gerd Gigerenzer explained that, in this case, mathematicians refined their formulae to model this pragmatic behaviour.[3] Keith Stanovich characterizes this as a Panglossian position in the debate—that humans are fundamentally rational and any variance between the normative position and empirical outcomes may be explained by such adjustments.[4]