We live in a world of our own misconceptions and myths. We often overestimate our talent and falls for many cognitive pitfalls. One major misconception we have is that we think rationally, that we arrive our choices and decisions through careful examination of the evidence or data with help of logic.
"We are far less rational in our decision making", and "our irrational behaviors are neither random nor senseless- they are systematic and predictable. We all make the same types of mistakes over and over, because of the basic wiring of our brains", says behavioral economist Dan Ariely in his book Predictably Irrational. We constantly make bad decisions in our life as a result of the emotions we are under, or our own personal biases.
So, what is rational thinking? According to Daniel Willingham , a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, "rational thinking encompasses our ability to draw justifiable conclusions from data, rules, and logic." Even though it is humanly impossible to be rational creatures like Spoke from the Star Treck, by employing certain tricks we can to an extent make us think rationally on matters of high importance. Here is how to do it:
Why do we think irrationally?
Before we get into how to think more rational, we must understand why we think irrationally in the first place, after all, we consider ourselves creatures of logic. Peter Ditto, a psychologist who studies judgment and decision-making, speaking to Discover magazine pointed out that, "people don't think like scientists; they think like lawyers. They hold the belief they want to believe and then they recruit anything they can to support it." Our natural tendency is to filter facts, however accurate they may, to support our pre-existing belief systems. "We almost never think about things without some preference in mind or some emotional inclination to want one thing or another", adds Ditto.
How can we think rationally?
The outsider perspective
Dan Airley, famous author and behavioral economics professor at Duke University, advises that the best way to make rational decisions is to think from an outsider's perspective. "When you think about your own life, you are trapped within your own perspective, you trapped within your own emotions and feelings and so on", says Dan Airley in a Big Think video .
Airley points out that there are circumstances where we will be overwhelmed with emotions to correctly calculating out the future course of events and make the right decisions. As an example, he mentioned the situation when someone gets into new a relationship. The infatuation over the other person prevents us from even figuring out the future sustainability of the relationship. However, Airley's advice to solve this problem is to get advice from other people in our life, especially our mothers.
Think in a foreign language
Being a bilingual or a polyglot can have numerous cognitive benefits. A study conducted by the University of Chicago found that native English speakers who had learned Japanese, native Korean speakers who had learned English and native English speakers studying French in Paris all made irrational choices when questions were presented in their native tongue. In their foreign language, however, they made rational decisions.
"When people use a foreign language, their decisions tend to be less biased, more analytic, more systematic, because the foreign language provides psychological distance," said the lead author of the study Boaz Keysar in a Scientific American articl e.
We may not be able to think logically all the time, but with these two methods at least we can make sure to think rational when making important decisions.
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