New Frameworks of Rationality

The nature and extent of human rationality is an issue of ongoing debate. In the last two decades, this debate has been enlivened by the development and application of new theoretical frameworks. These include Bayesian notions of adjusting and using uncertain beliefs in an inductive manner as well as deductive probability-based logics as normative guidelines against which to weigh human judgments and decisions; the notion of ecological rationality based on lean and frugal heuristics well adapted to the structure of the environment; the notion of meta-cognitive myopia according to which people are accurate and sensitive in the processing the information in a given sample of observations, but are blind and naive to the history and validity of the sampled data; and game theory.