Culture Mind and Brain Speaker Series
Folk epistemology of (ir)rationality
By Igor Grossmann, PhD, Wisdom & Culture Lab, University of Waterloo.
The talk will take place from 3 to 5pm via Zoom.
Please register here
BIONOTE
Igor Grossmann is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Waterloo, Canada, where he leads the Wisdom and Culture Lab. As a behavioral/social scientist, Grossmann has been working on demystifying what makes up a “wise” judgment in the context of revolving societal and cultural changes. His chief work aims to uncover misconceptions about wisdom and societal change and identifying cultural and psychological processes that enable people to think and act wisely. Grossmann’s work has been published in such outlets as Science Advances, Proceedings of the Royal Academy: Biological Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Perspectives on Psychological Science, Psychological Science, Journal of Experimental Psychology, and Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. His contributions have been recognized through numerous awards (e.g., Joseph B. Gittler Award from the American Psychological Foundation, SAGE Young Scholar Award from Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Rising Star Award from the Association for Psychological Science). He has been an Associate Editor of Emotion, and currently is an Associate Editor of the flagship journal for Social and Personality Psychology—Social Psychological and Personality Science, and co-hosts the “On Wisdom Podcast,” aiming to disseminate scientific insights from cognitive and social sciences to the broad academic audience and the general public. Professor Grossmann holds a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Michigan.
ABSTRACT
Rational economists and reasonable lawyers: Rationality and reasonableness as central tenets of folk theories of sound judgment
Normative theories of judgment either focus on the rational standard – decontextualized, rule-based preference maximization, or the reasonable standard – the pragmatic/interpretative balance of preferences and socially-conscious norms. Despite centuries of theoretical work on such concepts, a critical question appears overlooked: How do people’s intuitions and behavior about these concepts relate to theoretical frameworks advanced in economics, politics, and the law? I will show that people sustain both standards of judgmental competence, evidenced in spontaneous descriptions, personality characteristics and behavioral strategies they attribute to rational vs. reasonable agents. People spontaneously considered both rationality and reasonableness as central features of sound judgment and yet assigned unique attributes to these standards when mapping concept networks. I will further explore preferences for and perception of agents in different social contexts (varying in demands for rule-based vs. holistic approaches to decision-making), and categorization of non-social objects. The distinction between the rational and the reasonable holds in written media across multiple languages (English, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish). Further, experiments among North Americans and Pakistani bankers, street merchants, and samples engaging in exchange (vs. market-) economy show that rationality and reasonableness lead people to different conclusions about what constitutes good judgment in dilemmas that pit self-interest against fairness: Rationality is reductionist and instrumental, whereas reasonableness integrates preferences with particulars and moral concerns. Further experiments show that people favor rational agents for contexts demanding analytic reasoning and reasonable agents for contexts demanding interpretive/holistic reasoning. Moreover, across cultures, people used rule-based categorization for rational judgment and overall-similarity categorization for reasonable judgment of non-social objects