In Unreason’s Seductive Charms, David P. Barash, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington at Seattle, discusses reason and unreason, citing a number of amusing anecdotes:
To be sure, excessive reason is easy to caricature. Thus, at one point in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, our hero journeys to Laputa, whose male inhabitants are utterly devoted to their intellects: One eye focuses inward and the other upon the stars. Neither looks straight ahead. The Laputans are so cerebral that they cannot hold a normal conversation; their minds wander off into sheer contemplation. They require servants who swat them with special instruments about the mouth and ears, reminding them to speak or listen as needed. Laputans concern themselves only with pure mathematics and equally pure music. Appropriately, they inhabit an island that floats, in ethereal indifference, above the ground. Laputan women, however, are unhappy and regularly cuckold their husbands, who do not notice. The prime minister’s wife, for example, repeatedly runs away, preferring to live down on Earth with a drunk who beats her.
He points out a number of famously “rational” people who have behaved less than rationally:
Legend has it, for example, that when Pythagoras came up with his famous theorem, justly renowned as the cornerstone of geometry (that most logical of mental pursuits), he immediately sacrificed a bull to Apollo. Or think of Isaac Newton: pioneering physicist, both theoretical and empirical, he of the laws of motion and gravity, inventor of calculus, and widely acknowledged as the greatest of all scientists. (“Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night:/God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.”) This same Newton wrote literally thousands of pages, far more than all his physics and mathematics combined, seeking to explicate the prophecies in the Book of Daniel.
He also brings in some behavioral economics:
Would you accept a gamble that offers a 10-percent chance to win $95 and a 90-percent chance to lose $5? The great majority of people in the study rejected this proposition as a loser. Yet, a bit later, the same individuals were asked this question: Would you pay $5 to participate in a lottery that offers a 10-percent chance to win $100 and a 90-percent chance to win nothing? A large proportion of those who refused the first option accepted the second. But the options offer identical outcomes. As Kahneman and Tversky see it: “Thinking of the $5 as a payment makes the venture more acceptable than thinking of the same amount as a loss.” It’s all a matter of how the situation is framedin this case, the extent to which people are “risk averse.”
Some evolutionary psychology:
Which brings us to yet another perspective on why Homo sapiens isn’t always strictly sapient. Let’s start by agreeing with Herbert Simon (who also won a Nobel Prize in economics) that the mind is simply incapable of solving many of the problems posed by the real world, just because the world is big and the mind is small. But add this: The human mind did not develop as a calculator designed to solve logical problems. Rather, it evolved for a very limited purpose, one not fundamentally different from that of the heart, lungs, or kidneys; that is, the job of the brain is simply to enhance the reproductive success of the body within which it resides.This is the biological purpose of every mind, human as well as animal, and moreover, it is its only purpose. The purpose of the heart is to pump blood, of the lungs to exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide, while the kidneys’ work is the elimination of toxic chemicals. The brain’s purpose is to direct our internal organs and our external behavior in a way that maximizes our evolutionary success. That’s it. Given this, it is remarkable that the human mind is good at solving any problems whatsoever, beyond “Who should I mate with?,” “What is that guy up to?,” “How can I help my kid?,” “Where are the antelopes hanging out at this time of year?” There is nothing in the biological specifications for brain-building that calls for a device capable of high-powered reasoning, or of solving abstract problems, or even providing an accurate picture of the “outside” world, beyond what is needed to enable its possessors to thrive and reproduce. Put these requirements together, on the other hand, and it appears that the result turns out to be a pretty good (that is, rational) calculating device.
One of the most famous examples of evolutionary psychology is the Wason test:
In short, the evolutionary design features of the human brain may well hold the key to our penchant for logic as well as illogic. Following is a particularly revealing example, known as the Wason Test.Imagine that you are confronted with four cards. Each has a letter of the alphabet on one side and a number on the other. You are also told this rule: If there is a vowel on one side, there must be an even number on the other. Your job is to determine which (if any) of the cards must be turned over in order to determine whether the rule is being followed. However, you must only turn over those cards that require turning over. Let’s say that the four cards are as follows:
T 6 E 9
Which ones should you turn over?
[...]
Next, consider this puzzle. You are a bartender at a nightclub where the legal drinking age is 21. Your job is to make sure that this rule is followed: People younger than 21 must not be drinking alcohol. Toward that end, you can ask individuals their age, or check what they are drinking, but you are required not to be any more intrusive than is absolutely necessary. You are confronted with four different situations, as shown below. In which case (if any) should you ask a patron his or her age, or find out what beverage is being consumed?#1 Drinking Water
#2 Over 21
#3 Drinking Beer
#4 Under 21Nearly everyone finds this problem easy.
The two problems are logically identical.