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“Irrational” Behavior



I was just reading an article on sociological positivism on Wikipedia and came across the following point. They are saying that most sociologists today do not agree with positivism and argue

that human behavior is more complex than animal behavior or the movements of planets. Humans have free will, imagination and irrationality, so that our behavior is at best difficult to explain by rigid “laws of society”.

The more I think about this, the less certain I am that I agree. Mainly it has to do with this assumption that human behavior consists of - at least in part - irrational behavior. What does “irrational” actually mean though? It means without reason or without logic. Reason with a capital R seems very difficult to define, much less tangibly get a hold of. And logic, I still maintain, is a socio-historic toolset (and a valuable one), rather than an ultimate arbiter of truth.

So we might act outside of Reason (capital R), and outside of Logic, but do we ever act for no reason? Is there ever a time when our actions are totally without all sense, without some kind of cause or precedence or intelligble impulse. I would argue no. That even if we aren’t consciously aware of all the reasons for our behavior, that does not mean that they don’t exist or that we can’t be made or make ourselves aware of them.

Logic, of course, is one method making ourselves aware of the rational causes of what otherwise appear to be irrational behavior. Psychologist R.D. Laing was a big proponent of this sort of thing. He wrote extensively on unraveling the threads of real logic which run through complex, irrational and emotional behavior. His book “Knots” is probably the ultimate example of this. The book consists of vignettes of emotional logic, such as this short one (other longer ones may be read here):

It is our duty to bring up our children to love,
honour and obey us.
If they don’t they must be punished,
otherwise we would not be doing our duty.

If they grow up to love, honour and obey us
either we have brought them up properly
or we have not:
if we have
there must be something the matter with them;
if we have not
there is something the matter with us.

The problem I often find in trying to understand the “logic” hidden behind others’ emotional states, is that in exploring them I get tangled in the hidden logic of my own emotional states. But that doesn’t make any of it irrational. It just makes it goddamned difficult to figure out without getting sucked into recursive arguments. So, I guess that arguing that humans are rational and that the causes of our behavior are ultimately knowable would make me a positivist then?

Sorry, just trying to untangle some “knots” here for myself… I’ll keep at it.

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11 Reader Responses

  1. Tim Boucher Says:
    August 3rd, 2006 at 3:10 pm

    Good quote from Edward Bernays’ book Propaganda, p. 23

    .So the question naturally arose: If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it?

    The recent practice of propaganda has proved that it is possible, at least up to a certain point and within certain limits. Mass psychology is as yet far from being an exact science and the mysteries of human motivation are by no means all revealed. But at least theory and practice have combined with sufficient success to permit us to know that in certain cases we can effect some change in public opinion with a fair degree of accuracy by operating a certain mechanism, just as the motorist can regulate the speed of his car by manipulating the flow of gasoline.

    And 24:

    Trotter and Le Bon concluded that the group mind does not think in the strict sense of the word. In place of thoughts it has impulses, habits and emotions. In making up its mind its first impulse is usually to follow the example of a trusted leader . This is one of the most firmly established principles of mass psychology. … 24But when the example of the leader is not at hand and the herd must think for itself, it does so by means clichés, pat words or images which stand for a whole group of ideas or experiences.

  2. Tim Boucher Says:
    August 3rd, 2006 at 3:14 pm

    p 25

    Men are rarely aware of the real reasons which motivate their actions. A man may believe that he buys a motor car because, after careful study of the technical features of all makes on the market, he has concluded that this is the best. He is almost certainly fooling himself. He bought it, perhaps, because a friend whose financial acumen he respects bought one last week; or because his neighbors believed he was not able to afford a car of that class; or because its colors are those of his college fraternity.

    It is chiefly the psychologists of the school of Freud who have pointed out that many of man’s thoughts and actions are compensatory substitutes for desires which he has been obliged to suppress. A thing may be desired not for its intrinsic worth or usefulness, but because he has unconsciously come to see in it a symbol of something else, the desire for which he is ashamed to admit to himself. A man buying a car may think he wants it for purposes 0f locomotion, whereas the fact may be that he would really prefer not to be burdened with it, and would rather walk for the sake of his health. He may really want it because it is a symbol of social position, an evidence of his success in business, or a means of pleasing his wife.

  3. pmp Says:
    August 4th, 2006 at 11:47 am

    yeah, ‘irrational’ is just semantic shorthand for ‘not compatible with my own system of logic’. of course, that’s not the conscious meaning, implying that the person using the term is not fully conscious of either their own logic, the logic of the person being labeled as irrational, or some other dynamic of the system - which in itself i find to be very irrational. how funny is that!

  4. Rose Says:
    August 4th, 2006 at 1:35 pm

    If you are intuitive, does this mean you are irrational by someone’s definition, even thought you understand the “logic” of your intuition?

  5. chutney Says:
    August 4th, 2006 at 2:33 pm

    I don’t know that we’re irrational so much as motivated by conflicting rationalities. We’re essentially pack animals, but we belong to multiple, overlapping, and competing packs. Most of what we do is deciding which pack get priority at any given moment.

  6. Tim Boucher Says:
    August 4th, 2006 at 2:33 pm

    If you are intuitive, does this mean you are irrational by someone’s definition, even thought you understand the “logic” of your intuition?

    Yes, I think that does mean that!

  7. Tim Boucher Says:
    August 4th, 2006 at 2:35 pm

    I don’t know that we’re irrational so much as motivated by conflicting rationalities.

    YES! I think this is exactly it. It is like we have many different completely rational threads running at the same time, and our brains divert resources giving one or another of these threads priority. Then once that single rational thread has been given priority, it tries to bludgeon the others into submission, calling them irrational and trying to bend them to match the prioritized thread

  8. slomo Says:
    August 4th, 2006 at 5:43 pm

    There is a relatively new field of microeconomics/game theory called “behavioral microeconomics” that attempts to explain “irrational” human behavior in terms of a larger meta-logic. Scholars in this field (many at Harvard) are able to explain trust/betrayal and even “hatred”. They’ve done some interesting experiments. One thing I remember is that they found that Arabs had a much lower “betrayal” tolerance than Europeans, North Americans, or South Americans, like 0% vs. 20% (defined in terms of the probability of betrayal one would be willing to accept in a certain type of game with a certain expected payoff, and measured by asking subjects to play that game).

  9. Tim Boucher Says:
    August 4th, 2006 at 5:52 pm

    Wow, that’s incredible! Thanks

  10. Jacob Says:
    August 6th, 2006 at 4:32 am

    I wonder if any behavior can be considered rational until it’s put into words. Didn’t PKD say something about how rationality is often a retrospective attribution?

    I’ll ocasionally do inexplicable things that yield positive results; it’s not until the fruits of my actions are known to me that I can map out the processes logically. It’s like connect the dots: it’s really just a bunch of dots on a page, *you’re* essentially the one who makes a discernable pattern. We just seem to be suffering under the illusion that this pattern is “underlying.” We act like *our* logical processes underlies all things — it’s just an issue of complexity, the finer we hone our rationality, the more nature will yield its secrets… I disagree. The world created itself for no reason. Logic isn’t inherent in the universe, our rational ideas are barely just glancing blows at the truth. Even that’s not entirely correct, as it suggests that the truth can even be touched. At best, it can only be felt in the same way that we might feel something under a thin layer of plastic.

  11. Tim Boucher Says:
    August 6th, 2006 at 8:31 pm

    I wonder if any behavior can be considered rational until it’s put into words.

    Interesting point. You could follow this up with the connection between the Logos, the Word, and reason in Catholic theology.

    Didn’t PKD say something about how rationality is often a retrospective attribution?

    Yeah, it’s somewhere in here:

    http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2005/04/29/highlights-from-pkd-interview/



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