Questions tagged [rationality]
For questions about organisms' ability to make reasoned decisions that are optimal for achieving a goal or solving a problem.
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I need help with finding this specific psychology study!
I don't know where I have read this or watched this, but it's about a study which asks its participants (who were established as logical) to tear the photos of their families in exchange for some ...
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How does religion and pseudoscience manage to convince people to do irrational things when plain scientific evidence fail? [duplicate]
EDIT:
Had to edit my question for it to be re-opened. At this stage I do not care if it is re-opened but here is the edit: Stack exchange requires you to put your own research to your question or what ...
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Replication or conceptual replication of card trick in Mind Field Ep 8?
In Mind Field S1 E8 Michael Stevens presents a magician performing a trick with participants. Each participant is shown pairs of photographs of people and are given the forced choice of which one they ...
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Why do people take unreasonable conventions for granted?
There are irrational or even nonsensical conventions/lifestyles/costumes/norms that people don’t question but take for granted for a long time. Then some people start questioning them, then more ...
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Which psychological phenomena explains why someone would use something they paid for more than something that's free?
I've noticed some people are more inclined to use something they paid for even when it's not the best use of their time or a substitute is freely available that better solves their problem. I.e. since ...
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Can a subject develop learned helplessness without being conditioned?
In my understanding of this answer, the reason for person A to develop learned helplessness while person B to do not mostly (if not totally) boils down to the explanation styles of the two. But then ...
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Which area of psychology studies false beliefs?
Imagine a person has some false beliefs, which are also reflected then in his actions:
I don't want to interact with people because I don't trust them and 90% of time they will betray me
If I form ...
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Why do human beings double down on their perspective?
I am coming at this thinking about two different situations.
Those in political parties digging in their heels and doubling down on their beliefs.
Friends or relationship partners standing their ...
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Why do people fear ghosts but not believe in fairies?
I don't have any data to back this up, but it seems people are quick to question their non-belief in the horror side of the supernatural (while in dark rooms and the like), but still scoff at the idea ...
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What are common ideas to resolve a cognitive dissonance in which the belief is realistic but causes problems for "coping with the world"? [closed]
If we assume that there is no extrinsic meaning in life (objectively speaking), it follows that one needs to have intrinsic values to make one's life meaningful.
However, an objective observation of ...
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Is it normal to seek revenge when there's no rational benefit of it?
My understanding of the psychology of revenge has always been very simple: if you are wronged and do nothing about it, the perpetrator and everyone else who learns about that may get tempted to wrong ...
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Is there a term for simulated irrationality?
When 2 rational people want to accomplish their goals, they'll get compromise by meeting their goals halfway. But if one of them seems irrational, his opponent will go much farther in his concessions ...
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How can one get rid of a subconsciously persistent belief? [closed]
How can someone get rid of a belief that he thinks is not true, but at the same time he still suffers guilt whenever he is not acting in accord with that belief?
Here's an example that I made up to ...
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How to ask in a survey for emotional vs. rational personality
In a survey I would like to find out the correlation between different factors based on the personal dimension "being more emotional vs. rational".
Are there any known studies with items that could be ...
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To what extent is it true that both too much stress and too much relaxation lead to mental shortcuts? [closed]
Sometimes rational thought seems to be bypassed in the brain for more automatic behaviour (shortcuts, instinct, intuition, heuristics):
In The Willpower Instinct by Kelly McGonigal she writes that ...
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Is there a standardised questionnaire measuring tendency to think emotionally versus logically?
I want to conduct a research on the effect of emotions on decision. It is about the role of affective and cognitive processes in making a decision. I want to know if an individual relies more on ...
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What neural mechanism is responsible for our identification with a group? [closed]
Why do we need to identify ourselves with a group? Is there naturally a hormone/neurotransmiter reward? Or is it based on more complex mechanisms like finding the "deeper" meanings of our actions?
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How to assess the rationality of real-life decisions?
I am looking for scales that measure the extent to which the process by which a person arrived at a real-life decision conformed to the principles of decision theory. I am specifically interested in ...
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The prisoner dilemma does not violate classical probability laws
To read before (following some answers or comments)
My background: As a mathematician, probability theory is my field of research; please do not answer/comment just to refer to a course on ...
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Term for behaviour of transfering personal problems to other people and trying to solve them there?
I think my question is a little tricky to express, but I have observed this kind of behaviour pattern many times, and would like to know if it is coined in cognitive science.
As an example, consider ...
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Can rationalization be objectively recognized?
In psychology and logic, rationalization or rationalisation (also known as making excuses[1]) is a defense mechanism in which controversial behaviors or feelings are justified and explained in a ...
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Why can't subjective utilities take probabilities into account?
If my understanding of expected utility theory is correct,
it is rational for a decision maker to have subjective utilities for objective consequences. For example, it can be rational for a ...
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How does conscious rational internal thought gets initiated - what gives rise to it on any given day?
I'm reading a book called "The power of now" by Ekhart Tolle, and in that book he suggests that internal dialogue/monologue/planning/judging can be first observed, then disidentified with and ...
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Can we explain the tendency of investors dollar cost averaging in terms of loss aversion?
For those unfamiliar with the term Dollar cost averaging (DCA)
is an investment strategy for reducing the
impact of volatility on large purchases of financial assets such as
equities. By ...
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What drives civilization? [closed]
Fossil record indicates humanity arose on the African Continent - in/around Gauteng. Yet the oldest civilizations on record are far afield - Ebla, Mesopotamia
What drives civilization? Why is the ...
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Do people estimate combined probabilities differently to uncombined ones?
Suppose, somebody has to estimate the likelihood of one of the following events (or has to estimate which event is more likely):
A coin is tossed six times and each time the result is heads. (...
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Which branch of psychology deals with decision making under stress?
Our decisions are usually based on a system of perspectives, which in turn are based on one's own set of values. However there are traumatizing situations where this system of perspectives is turned ...
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Is fear rational? [closed]
Let's suppose a big ugly monster thingy wants to eat you. While you're running away from it, you're feeling fear. Can this situation be considered one where fear would be rational?
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Causal reasoning(implicit models?) vs grammar of native language [closed]
I was reading about linguistic relativity and it struck me that there could also be differences in multilingual individuals and mono/bi-lingual individuals on how they derive/reason/create structure ...
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What makes people easily subscribe to pseudoscientific theories?
There are many theories/disciplines that have been categorized as pseudoscience in the scientific community.
The list includes many things that are regularly even quoted in media like graphology, ...
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Human behaviour in one-shot perfect information games
Background
A one-shot game is one where two participants have some set of actions $\{1, ... , n\}$, they make their decision on which option to take (without knowing the decision of their partner, or ...
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What tasks does Bayesian decision-making model poorly?
Bayesianism has been a relatively successful paradigm for modeling decision-making. However, not every psychologist is a bayesian, and there are tasks such as the Tversky & Shafir (1992) ...
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How can the success of Bayesian models be reconciled with demonstrations of heuristic and biased reasoning?
In recent years, Bayesian models of cognition have been used - with considerable success - to explain human reasoning in a variety of inferential tasks (Chater, Tenenbaum, & Yuille, 2006). These ...
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Online datasets for the disjunction effect and violations of the sure-thing principle
The disjunction effect (or violation of the sure-thing principle) is as follows:
A disjunction effect occurs when people prefer x over y when they know that event A obtains, and they also pre...
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What are popular rationalist responses to Tversky & Shafir?
In the early 90s Tversky & Shafir observed several violations of rationality in human participants, in particular violation of the disjunction effect and sure-thing principle. This has lead to ...
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What is the definition of sanity? How can I prove someone either sane or insane?
In my experience the definition of insanity is thus:
Insanity: The state of being seriously mentally ill, mad, and/or irrational.
Is there a proper scientific definition of this term? While ...
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How is motivation influenced by chance of reward?
Sometimes, I work on a project where there is a chance that the whole project will become irrelevant before it is finished. I have noticed that even though I believe that the risk of this happening is ...
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Do students exhibit rational behavior in determining study time?
While I teach some economics classes, I must admit to near complete ignorance on the optimization processes students undertake when studying. We often say that the "best" students are those who earn ...
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