Folk standards of sound judgment: Rationality Versus Reasonableness

Abstract

Normative theories of judgment either focus on rationality (decontextualized preference maximization) or reasonableness (pragmatic balance of preferences and socially conscious norms). Despite centuries of work on these concepts, a critical question appears overlooked: How do people’s intuitions and behavior align with the concepts of rationality from game theory and reasonableness from legal scholarship? We show that laypeople view rationality as abstract and preference maximizing, simultaneously viewing reasonableness as sensitive to social context, as evidenced in spontaneous descriptions, social perceptions, and linguistic analyses of cultural products (news, soap operas, legal opinions, and Google books). Further, experiments among North Americans and Pakistani bankers, street merchants, and samples engaging in exchange (versus market) economy show that rationality and reasonableness lead people to different conclusions about what constitutes good judgment in Dictator Games, Commons Dilemma, and Prisoner’s Dilemma: Lay rationality is reductionist and instrumental, whereas reasonableness integrates preferences with particulars and moral concerns.

The reasonable, the rational, and the good: On folk theories and flexible use of different concepts of good judgment.

“…Specifically, we explored whether they conceptualized rational agents as analytical and emphasizing individualistic characteristics and reasonable agents as holistic and emphasizing the integration of social norms. Consistent with earlier work (Grossmann et al, 2020) on WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) samples, we found differences in the attributions Chinese participants made for rational compared to reasonable agents. Specifically, rational agents tended to be described using terms more narrowly focused on the qualities of logic and reason.…”

“…To address these competing possibilities, we first tested the presence of expectations for donations by rational and reasonable agents in a Dictator Game (Kahneman et al, 1986), aiming to replicate economic decision-making preferences for rational and reasonable agents (Grossmann et al, 2020). We did so in a preregistered Study 4 conducted in China -a collectivist culture with a less pronounced history of market economic transactions.…”

“…Ideas about contrasting standards of sound judgment have a long history in philosophy, with the distinct standards typically labelled rationality and reasonableness (Oakeshott, 1962;Toulmin, 2001;Vico 1744Vico /1976; see Table S1 in Grossmann et al, 2020). For philosophers and some social scientists, the standard of rationality dictates that judgment is sound to the extent that it abstracts away from the idiosyncratic features of individual cases and focuses on generalizable properties and rule-like patterns.…”

“…Initial evidence suggests that laypeople may differentiate rationality from reasonableness in the context of economic problems: laypeople associate rationality with self-interested decision-making and reasonableness with fair-minded decision-making (Grossmann et al, 2020). This work further showed that despite overlap in views of rational and reasonable persons, laypeople are more likely to ascribe rational persons characteristics that involve insulating reasoning from particular contextual influences (e.g., logic, emotion suppression) and more likely to ascribe reasonable persons characteristics that indicate sensitivity to contexts, particularly social contexts (e.g., morals, interpersonal sensitivity).…”

Evidence-Based Training of Wisdom in Business and Management: Use of Scientific Insights About Malleability of Practical Wisdom for Rigorous Interventions

“…As recently established in the common position framework across the majority of empirically working wisdom scientists, such features of reasoning or meta-cognition as at the core of the vast majority of contemporary empirical wisdom models (Grossmann et al 2020c). Such features of morally grounded reasoning also converge with the lay perspectives on the core aspects of sound judgment in the context of economic and everyday social transactions (Grossmann et al 2020b).…”