To his wife’s annoyance, Steven Pinker arrives at airports as late as possible. “I have a pathological fear of being early,” says the psychologist. But, at the age of 68, he has not given up on his ability to change this irrational habit. “I do recalibrate.”
This is Pinker’s message to all of us: that being more rational in our decisions would make us happier. We can recalibrate, because reports of our irrationality have been grossly exaggerated. Behavioural economics — whose findings of biased decisions have won several Nobel Prizes — needs a corrective. “I don’t sign on to the most pessimistic conclusion which is that humans are inherently irrational.”
In his book Rationality, Pinker argues that, although people struggle with abstract reasoning, we make logical decisions when dilemmas are grounded in everyday terms. After all, “we’re obviously rational in the sense of the world we’ve built. We did invent the vaccines, we did go to the Moon.”