The concept of bounded rationality is not well-defined. Several aspects of bounded rationality are discussed. Two different kinds of bounded rationality are distinguished. First, rationality may be bounded in the sense that the player cannot perform all the necessary calculations within the time frame of the game. This applies not only to numerical calculations but also to any kind of informati...

Models in the classical theory of games and in neoclassical economics normally assume rationality in the sense that agents have compete and transitive preferences. The paper labels this fundamental rationality and distinguishs two other sorts of rationality pertinent to the study of strategic interaction: individual economic rationality (IER) and effective rationality. IER is, we observe, chara...

I took the title of this chapter from an email Herbert A. Simon sent me in May 1999. In this email, he wrote a statement for the back cover of Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart in which he commented: “I think the book strikes a great blow for sanity in the approach to rationality [and shows] why more than minor tampering with existing optimization theory is called for.” But Herb wouldn’t be ...

Rational requirements have a special status in the theory of rationality. This is obvious in one sense: they supply the content of that theory. But I want to suggest that rational requirements have another special status—as objects of the theory of rationality. In slogan form, my thesis is: Fixed Point Thesis: Mistakes about the requirements of rationality are mistakes of rationality. The key c...

We propose an abstract framework to analyse the rationality of change operators deened in a syntactical way. More precisely we propose \syntactical" postulates of rationality stemming from AGM ones. Then we introduce ve change operators based on forward chaining. Finally we apply our abstract framework to analyse the rationality of our operators.

A growing body of studies suggests that neurological and mental abnormalities foster conformity to norms of rationality that are widely endorsed in economics and psychology, whereas normality stands in the way of rationality thus defined. Here, we outline the main findings of these studies, discuss their implications for experimental design, and consider how 'sane' some benchmarks of rationalit...

As societies transform from a predominantly traditional to a predominantly modem system they tend to experience considerable demographic changes. Ansley Coale (1984) notes that this "transformation is the substitution of slow growth achieved with low fertility and mortality for slow growth maintained with relatively high fertility and mortality rates." Islam is one of the world’s major monothei...

Does Buddhism really promote tolerance? Based on cross-cultural and cross-religious evidence, we hypothesized that Buddhist concepts, possibly differing from Christian concepts, activate not only prosociality but also tolerance. Subliminally priming Buddhist concepts, compared with neutral or Christian concepts, decreased explicit prejudice against ethnic, ideological, and moral outgroups among...

In modern cognitive science, rationality and intelligence are measured using different tasks and operations. Furthermore, in several contemporary dual process theories of cognition, rationality is a more encompassing construct than intelligence. Researchers need to continue to develop measures of rational thought without regard to empirical correlations with intelligence. The measurement of ind...