Rational irrationality: A conceptual defense

Abstract

In his recent critique of rational irrationality, Spencer Paulson argues that the concept fails as an explanation of voter behavior because it cannot account for the inherent nature of policy beliefs as commitments to action and is therefore reflectively unstable. This paper defends rational irrationality against Paulson’s critique by examining two key distinctions between voting behavior and Paulson’s toxin puzzle analogy: the role of feasibility in connecting beliefs to practical commitments, and the fundamentally different epistemic processes involved in forming political versus non-political beliefs. By situating these distinctions within Herbert Simon’s bounded rationality framework, I show that rational irrationality remains a coherent and parsimonious explanation for why individuals who demonstrate rationality across most domains exhibit systematic biases specifically in political reasoning.