Why Do Humans Act Irrationally?
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Human beings will make unwise decisions — and sometimes they’ll make radically unwise decisions. But we aren’t fundamentally rational or irrational creatures.
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Alfred Mele:

Alfred Mele is an American philosopher and the William H. and Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University. He specializes in irrationality, akrasia, intentionality and philosophy of action. He is the author of several books, most recently "Effective Intentions," published in 2009.
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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: Can humans act against their own better judgment?

Alfred Mele: Plato, or at least Socrates, who’s views Plato expressed, had an opinion about this and the idea was that as the tempting option become closer in time, more available, more readily available, what happens is, you switch your judgment so that at the last second, the student would always judge that really, it’s best to go to the party.

Now, I, myself, don’t think that happens partly on the basis of personal experience, but also partly, well there’s this thing called experimental philosophy now where instead of relying on our own personal intuitions on how things happen, we actually go out and do surveys of ordinary people and of course, the ordinary people are usually undergraduates. But undergraduates are pretty ordinary, nice people, but you know, just lay people. And one thing I did was a survey of, I think about 90 undergraduates recently. And I said, “Does this ever happen to you? You judge that it would be best to do a certain thing, and best from your own point of view too, not the point of view of your peers or parents, or whatever. And then still believing that you should do this thing, you do something else instead. Does it every happen?” And I had a, what’s called, a Libert Scale that goes from one to seven, and it was strongly disagree at one end – I mean, strongly agree at the one end, at the one, and strongly disagree at the seven. And the mean rating was, as I recall, 1.32. So, almost all of them you know agreed that they do it sometimes. Now, they could be wrong. You know, they could be fooling themselves. But I suspect they’re right. And if you think about your own case and I think about my own case, sometimes I am convinced that I shouldn’t do a certain thing and I just think, “What the hell. I’ll do it, I shouldn’t, but I will.” But it’s never anything really bad, but it might be something like smoking a cigarette. I’m trying to quit right now because I’ve had dental surgery. But New Year’s Eve I smoked a cigarette, and I thought I shouldn’t. So, yeah, I think it happens.

And why should we think that it doesn’t happen? Well, if we thought that what we’re most strongly motivated to do always lines up with what we judged best, then since we always do what we are most strongly motivated to do, we would think that when we do it we’re judging it best. But there’s just too much evidence against it.

Question: Can the mind ever really deceive itself, or does it choose what to believe or disbelieve?

Alfred Mele: What might make self-deception impossible is a certain model of it, and it’s a traditional model. And the model is a two-person intentional deception model. So, if I’m going to deceive you into believing something, I’ve got to know that’s it’s false and come up with a strategy for getting you to believe that it’s true. And the normal strategy is lying, and then you trust me, let’s say. So, if you use that model for self-deception, then in the same head, you’ve got knowing what’s true, the intention to get yourself to believing that it’s false, and you’ve got some kind of strategy for doing it. Now, that’s very puzzling, or paradoxical. How are you going to pull it off? It’s as though I said, “Look, I’m going to deceive you now into believing that I drive a Range Rover, and this is how I’m going to do it. I’m going to put a picture of me next to a Range Rover out of my wallet and show it to you and you’re going to believe it’s true, but really it’s false.” Well, is that going to work? No. No way, because you know what I’m up to, right?

So, if you put all this in one head, then it looks like, well the person knows what he’s up to, so he can’t possibly succeed. So, it’s paradoxical. And also, the person would have to believe at the same time the truth, and it’s opposite. They both have to be there in the same place.

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