The Fetish of Rationality
Rationality is a fetish of our modern world. We are seldom allowed by our culture to admit true irrationality as an explanation for a decision we make for our observed behaviors. Yet we are surrounded by aspects of human behavior that are irrational - from our political and religious systems to lotteries, dating, responses to the pandemic, buying land in the metaverse, cryptocurrencies and meme stocks, just to name a few.
This fetish of rationality is particularly strong in many of the Business Cultures I've observed. Within these cultures, identifying as a rational decision maker is popular, and so are superficial logical explanations for human motivations accompanied by lots of data.
My own belief is that unless a description of human behavior leads to understanding and insight, it has only limited value. For instance, I might collect very accurate data on the behavior of people in the Starbucks. I could state, based on observations carried out with scientific accuracy, that when human beings enter, they generally walk to the counter in the room, look at the menu board for a short time to place their order and move to another line for their beverage, take it and walk to a table, sit down and pull out their smartphone, and at regular intervals, sip their beverage. I can record the types of beverages, the number of people, the temperature of the room, the color of the walls and so on. I would still be psychological galaxies away from describing and understanding what this ritual means, the importance of identity, the enormous social complexity of the process.
To get down below the surface to fundamental insights is to accept without fear or embarrassment that quite a number of human motivations are irrational, unconscious and unknown to the people themselves. The application of this principle means that easy, superficial logical explanations should be scrutinized with suspicion, and should be accepted as the real explanation of human behavior only when all their efforts to explain them in a fundamental fashion have failed.
