Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Martina Orlandi who is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Trent University Durham, Canada. Her research focuses on moral psychology, philosophy of mind (including philosophy of artificial intelligence), and philosophy of action. She has a specific interest in practical irrationality and particularly self-deception, self-control, and resilience. Martina Orlandi Suppose you’re having a conversation with your old friend Sasha. She casually tells you how her husband has been behaving lately: he’s getting calls at weird times of the day, he’s getting home later than usual, and last week Sasha saw a flirty text message show up on his phone. In spite of all this, Sasha insists that things are good between them and that her husband is faithful. You know that Sasha is self-deceived about this. Her self-deceit lasts for a few months until one day Sasha tells you that she left her husband after he admitted to having an affair. While this news doesn’t surprise you, what comes ...

This post is by Predrag Teovanović (pictured above), graduate student at the University of Belgrade. In this post he summarises his recent paper ‘ Individual Differences in Cognitive Biases: Evidence Against One-Factor Theory of Rationality ’, co-authored with Goran Knežević and Lazar Stankov, published in Intelligence. If there is a minimal definition of rational behavior, it can be found here . From the normative standpoint, rational behaviour is hard (if not impossible) to maintain all the time. Hence, we satisfice by trying to optimize the boundaries of bounded rationality at the intersection of our own resources (time, information, money, and cognitive capacities) and environmental demands. Cognitive biases (CBs) emerge in that junction.   Since what defines rational behaviour depends on both environment and organism, and since specific CBs arise in different environments - it is reasonable not to expect from CBs to be highly related to individual differences ...