UKC

Humans do not always act logically, or so it seems. A good example is the placebo effect, whereby people respond positively even though they know they've been given nothing more than a sugar pill, though I'm sure we all can come up with examples of behaviour that doesn't seem to make logical sense. Indeed, exploiting such human irrationality was the only way Captain Kirk was able to beat half of his foes!

My question: Could there be an evolutionary advantage to irrationality, or is it simply a flaw in the evolved end product we call human beings?

Evolution is entirely irrational, obvously.

Why?

Are you confusing rational with intentional?

Is it not that some evolved behaviour which boosted our chances of successful reproduction when we were living in small bands on the African savannah, and which we are now stuck with, is not so great in modern technological societies.

is culture rational?

I think a lot of human irrationality stems from a desire to create narratives; to see patterns even if they don't exist. Of course seeing patterns that don't exist is not an advantage, but being very good at seeing ones that do exist is. For example the gambler's fallacy is really a misinterpretation of the pattern of regression to the mean, while the hot-hand fallacy may actually be a correct (if overestimated) recognition of a real pattern. The narrative that someone who has managed a recent string of successes is likely to continue to be successful is stronger than the actual positive feedback effect.

I also think that the sunk cost fallacy results from faulty narrative - we have a story of ourselves being somewhat rational people who make sensible decisions. Writing off a sunk cost goes against that narrative because it implies that the earlier decision which resulted in the cost was incorrect.

As we're all going to die anyway, perhaps a rational response to realising that would be to kill ourselves and save a lifetime of toil and trouble. Ergo our irrationality in not taking the easy way out is the only action that keeps the species alive and evolving.

That just rephrases the question to become: what and why would irrational behaviour boost our chances of survival, in any society?

I think it's more that we're given such complex and advanced brains that we can't handle them at all well, I.e we often use them to construct - without realising it - bad, illogical arguments.

I think there's a lot of truth in there. Brains surely evolved to overcome problems and gain advantage, and as the 'thinking fast and slow' theory goes, in many cases a quite good answer very quickly is preferable to a precise answer that comes too late. I suppose we've come to rely on such heuristic reasoning to such an extent that we sometimes refuse to acknowledge that in some cases there are much better answers to be found, thereby rejecting rational explanations in favour of pre-existing beliefs or intuitive hunches.

I would argue logic* is of little relevance to most human behaviour. There's loads of logical evidence that people don't change their mind when presented with new logical evidence. It's seems illogical to argue humans are very logical. And I have conclusive logical evidence - if humans were logical, the writers of Star Trek would not have included Spock & Vulcans!

I enrolled in a clinical trial because I knew the placebo effect of extra attention would make me feel better. The placebo effect is a complication for the study but was good for me as a real patient. 

The placebo effect also applies to side effects and amusingly the placebo effect is greater in the USA because they're used to TV ads telling them how wonderful prescription drugs are. Hence I expect clinical trails are less successful in the USA.

The brain consumes about 20% of our energy. Logic is wasted brain power compared to quick irrationality and lazy prejudice. Hence the logical people died out and exist only in Star Trek. 

*any logical conclusion is largely predetermined by the values, assumptions, morals or beliefs (often aspects of religion, irreligion & politics) that underlie any logic. The logical part is almost trivial in comparison. Hence we all see pretty much the same world but still disagree.

My logical argument is that logic is nearly irrelevant.

Of course it would be illogical to believe my thinking is any different from that norm.

I think there arguably is some adaptive benefit to “irrationality”. How many influential discoveries and inventions are the result of someone going against all the evidence available at the time, or doing something dangerous and foolish that no “rational” decision making would support? How many famous artists, inventors and thinkers have carried on with their work at times when no one is listening, it isn’t making them any money, and the “rational” voices around them are telling them to stop wasting time and get a “proper job”. How many have stood up to oppressive regimes, when rationally they know that it will likely result in their death or torture. I’d wager that it’s more than a few. 

I’d reckon that an occasional injection of irrationality has probably been a significant catalyst for all sorts of things  over the millennia: technological progress, philosophy, the discovery of new lands and food sources…

I thought the point was you don't know you're getting a sugar pill. In a double-blind trial, you wouldn't tell the control group they're getting the placebo. In fact you wouldn't know at the point of delivery. That would rather undermine the purpose of determining whether the active component is having an effect greater than that of placebo.

The point is you're possibly experiencing a positive benefit from the *belief* that you *are* getting the active component.

"Placebos produce effect even when patients know it’s just sugar"

https://www.apa.org/monitor/2011/03/placebos

I'm a great believer in placebos and that seems entirely logical to me as there appears to be scientific evidence for my belief.

My wife works in clinical trials, but my area is music production. There are some great 'placebo' effects in audio. The world of 'high end' Hi-Fi snake oil being the most obvious. Other funny things can be turning a knob/pushing a fader that does nothing to keep a client happy. "More vocal? Sure, let me just increase it a little here....."  Not that I would ever do such a thing.... A comedy example was the studio that rigged up a 'do nothing' box for Brian Wilson's (The Beach Boys) dad, so he felt like he was doing something in the recording sessions and had something to push. Lol. 

Yes, I thought the point of a placebo was that you didn't know it was a fake, but because you believed it was genuine you thought you felt better. 

Ah well, I've updated my understanding of placebos now.

No, it's been shown conclusively that the placebo effect is still effective even when people have been told they're getting a placebo. Hard for a rational mind) to believe, but true!

If there is, is it really irrational?  That advantage would make it rational, even if it appears otherwise.

If I was in such a study and told I was getting the placebo, then I'd probably distrust the researchers and judge them (as part of the study) to be lying, and that I'd in fact be getting the real drug.  In which case the placebo effect would kick in.

Fighting another tribe, another ape like species, doing something irrational, illogical, unpredictable might give you an advantage.

Imagine those early fire starters, stones, sticks, cooking. Something made them act differently, take a risk. We must be the only species that doesn't run from fire, but starts it, probably first ate animals killed by natural wildfires.

Irrational, unconventional, curious, there is a fine line between.  

Edit. Placebo effect shows how important a happy, confident, positive outlook can be to good health. Have the opposite and it can run the body down in all respects, all those chemicals the brain does or doesn't trigger the release of have an impact. 

Werner Heisenberg — 'Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.'

Elsewhere — 'Not only is the Universe sillier than we think, it is sillier than we can think.'

One positive aspect of the placebo effect, seems to be that the more positively we think about getting older, the slower we seem to decline. I read something in New Scientist, which put it as starkly as, two identical twins could have the same DNA, and the difference in how they age would come down to how they thought about aging.

That'll do for me as a positive...

Yes, but, remarkably, they have been shown to work even when you do know.

Expecting to find an evolutionary advantage to irrationality suggests that we started off rational and evolved irrationality. To be honest, I'd assume that it's the other way around - we started off as relatively simple bags of irrational reflexes and gradually evolved to become slightly more complex bags of irrational reflexes with a bit of ability to do rational decision making and abstract problem solving, but we still mostly operate on an non-rational / instinctive level because for most evolutionarily relevant situations that actually works fine.

Are you saying that you are rational, a person who has devoted his life to climbing, and that people you observe are not rational? There is nothing rational about climbing.

I would suggest your initial premise that "Humans do not always act logically" is flawed in that Humans usually act logically according to their perspective of the world, at that moment, and their experiences of life that lead up to that moment. However you then say, "or so it seems" , that would be to the observer who has different perspective to the actor, so it would seem you are acknowledging the possibility of different perspectives.

I've not seen the article, but I can well imagine it to be the case. After all, our thoughts and outlooks have effects on our actions. It's not hard to imagine the sort of better lifestyle choices you could make as an optimistic person rather than a pessimistic one (in relation to ageing). i.e. "I will go for that walk/yoga class/healthy dinner option, after all, I'm going to be here enjoying life for years to come..." vs. "what's the point of that walk/yoga class/healthy dinner option, after all, I'm getting old and I'll be dead soon..."

I'm sure that many of us here could make a decent rational case for climbing if so minded. 'Rational' cases can be made for all kinds of human behaviour and actions, not always ones that we feel are moral and ethical. It can be problematic, as you can see with attempts to produce rational frameworks such as utilitarianism. 

Albert Ellis proposed something along these lines-

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-biological-basis-of-human-irratio...

I suspect your main problem is going to be around the nature of irrationality and the (value) judgements that exist around what is and isn't irrational as hinted at in my response to Steve above.

I think it can relate to 'bounce' as well, a brother is only 4 years older than me, and eats healthily, our other brother is 11 years older than myself, and the middle brother seems to be older in outlook/fatalism already and to my mind has less bounce than our oldest brother, or less vitality.

He walks everywhere, but somehow he still less bounce, it seems to me, and (coincidentally or not) has talked about certain things just being down to getting older rather than something one might be able to affect, like aches and twinges or putting on certain weight around the middle.

I think one has to 'believe in bounce to keep it' to some degree.

Climbing, it supplies the brain with the chemical and or electrical simulation it craves, others requiring different hits, might run, fish, knit....

Many  climbers do other adventure sports as they all likely achieve the same results in the brain. 

It's frustrating when otherwise intelligent people don't recognise this narrative issue affects everyone and even more so when they do recognise it but think their intellect makes them immune. I like working with optical illusions as seeing something that isn't there (or vice versa) is a salutary lesson in psychology.

That's one argument for climbing... me, I'm with Tom Patey:

"'Why do you climb?'... The answer should be apparent to the veriest moron. 'Because it is the natural thing to do.'" 

(Comments about the naturalistic fallacy suspended in this thread... )

The question, for me, would be are there really that many situations where we have all the information and/or learning to make an entirely 'logical' decision ? I think a certain amount of guesswork (irrationality ?) Is required in all our decisions.

as our self is all about emotion I'd expect a level of rationality associated with what pleases us or does not please us.

as we are pleasure driven it could be logical to pursue happiness as long as it does not cause bad outcomes

Hence it is logical to have culture as it makes life worth living even if it feeds us not

I think there's some extremely loose use of "logical" and "rational" in a lot of this discussion. For instance, pursuing happiness might be "logical" in the sense of "normal and sensible" but "this feels good so I'll do it more" is one of the most basic and instinctive responses going.

Irrationality often gets confused with intuition. Far from being a flaw, I think intuition is an essential trait that makes us human, cleverer and evolutionally more robust than a population of automatons operating on logic alone.

Some of what was once essential intuitive thought processes in early humans, are now seen as irrational because modern logic can't cope with anything that can't be evidenced, like spirituality and religion. And yet they still exist. I'm no fan of organised religion, but I do think the spiritual and reverential feel for nature and the planet will play a big part (maybe even the only part) in preventing humans from annihilating themselves.

The placebo effect also seems irrational because it operates on a similar unconscious level, and if the dualistic view still holds that mind and body (subject and object) are separate, why do we have 40,000 neurones in the heart and 100 million in the gut, interconnected with the 86 billion neurones in the brain? Are the seemingly irrational sayings: "I feel it in my heart" and "I have a gut feel about this" really irrational throwaways, or accurate intuition?

I have only dabbled in Buddhism, but as I understand it Buddhists do not pursue happiness, as it is a high that will be followed by a low, and from a Buddhist perspective our entire western consumerist system of pursuit of happiness and endless growth, is nether logical or rational, and not sensible, and is a symptom of a troubled mind, but for many of us in the west, it is "normal".

Is that enough to make my gut brainier than many species? That's weird idea!

I just googled the dinosaur with two brains from my *childhood, but it turns out to be a myth

*no, I'm not that old, I heard about it as a child

This is what I mean about terminology being used loosely, to be honest. Intuitive or instinctive behaviour is clearly not "rational behaviour" in the sense that it isn't driven by some sort of reasoning process - in that sense I'd call it "irrational". But we also use "irrational" to mean essentially "doing the opposite of what is rational".

For instance, there's a good rational reason not to step backwards off a cliff. As most people experience when they first abseil, there's also a very strong instinctive reaction not to lean backwards off a cliff, even if you're clearly well secured to a bombproof anchor. I'd say that the instinct to not lean backwards over a cliff is irrational because it doesn't require a rational thought process to happen for the instinct to kick in, and I think that in the context of a discussion about evolution the process is what matters, but I think other people would only call it irrational when you're anchored to something solid, and rational when you aren't.

In that case I'd say the answer to "why do we sometimes exhibit irrational behaviour" is "because we sometimes we get into situations that aren't the ones that our brains have evolved to handle and we rely on the instinctive bits rather than the rational ones".

I'm being extremely careful, not loose with words

I'd suggest that the opposite is the case: our brains have evolved to handle situations that rational thought processes are too slow to deal with effectively by using instinctive or intuitive processes. New fast automatic humans...

I love both of those!

There are two different goals: finding theories which are true and finding theories which are likely to benefit you.   Human instinct hasn't evolved to find out what is true it's evolved to help us survive and prosper.

Believing a medicine will help can make you feel better for a while, that's a functional advantage in terms of helping an individual survive and prosper.  You could argue the same for religion: not worrying about death and feeling superior might make you happy, independent if the belief is true.  The belief that you can be a billionaire may make you work harder and do better financially even if rationally you've got near zero chance of achieving it.

The belief in Scottish independence may make you feel better for a while even if rationally you've got near zero chance of achieving it.

😂

Why do you think this? As far as I can see, most animals are capable of instinctive behaviour and of learning more such behaviour through imitation or through trial and error. The capacity for rational or abstract thought seems to be much rarer and more limited, which would be hard to explain if it was a later evolutionary step...

I think that what I should have been saying is that our brains have evolved rational and logical processes to gain an evolutionary advantage whilst at the same time retaining our more instinctive capabilities. But these new capabilities will have evolved later on top of the earlier functions, (or more likely deeply enmeshed with them). I assume these capabilities began to develop when the human mlnd became capable of symbolic thought and then language. It would also require developments in memory capacity. 

It’s a fascinating area anyway, one I think I would like to find out more about. I’ve read that the human brain is possibly the most complex thing in our known universe, so explaining how it came to be like this, and how it works, is extraordinarily difficult. 

Oh definitely. I am currently expending a lot of effort at work considering whether to make a radical design change at a late stage. We are working very hard to gather lots of information and quantify risks etc, nominally to allow us to make a rational decision. In reality everybody on the panel (me included) has already made up their mind about whether we should make this change or not, and the evidence will be massaged or weighted to give the "right" result. My suggestion at the beginning that we should just take a vote and save all this work did not go down terribly well.

My narrative is basically that I think of myself as a good designer, and believe I can deliver a successful project without making the design change. To make the change is to admit that we have bitten off more than we can chew and are carrying a fair amount of risk. I am also obviously emotionally invested in my work so far (sunk cost fallacy I mentioned before), and I am probably biased towards the status quo. Does this introspection change my preference? Not one iota.