When Rationality Becomes Irrational

The Michael Shermer Show

Michael Shermer

Natural Sciences, Science

4.3 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 11 October 2025

⏱️ 89 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For many decision scientists, their starting point—drawn from economics—is a quantitative formula called Rational Choice Theory, allowing people to calculate and choose the best options.

The problem is that this framework assumes an overly simplistic picture of the world, in which different types of values can be quantified and compared, leading to the "most rational" choice. Behavioral economics acknowledges that irrationality is common but still accepts the underlying belief from economics of what a rational decision should look like.

Drawing from economics, psychology, and philosophy—and both inspired by and challenging Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow—Barry Schwartz shows how the focus on rationality, narrowly understood, fails to fully describe how we think about our decisions, much less help us make better ones.

Barry Schwartz is professor emeritus of psychology at Swarthmore College and visiting professor at Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley. His research and writing focus on the intersection of psychology and economics, particularly with regard to decision-making, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and the nature of human values. His books include The Paradox of Choice, Why We Work, and (as coauthor) Practical Wisdom. His new book, co-authored with the philosopher Richard Schuldenfrei, is Choose Wisely: Rationality, Ethics, and the Art of Decision-Making.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to The Michael Shermer Show.
0:15.9	Barry, nice to see you. Thanks for coming on to talk to me.
0:18.9	Thank you so much for having me, Michael. I'm excited.
0:21.5	It's a good book. I read it very carefully because I write a bit in this area. And your work
0:28.1	was highly influential in my 2008 book, The Mind of the Market, which was really on evolutionary
0:33.6	economics, behavioral economics, and all that stuff. And, you know, I've been steeped in, you know, the whole, this whole paradigm that you were
0:40.5	one of the pioneers of. So I was amazed to get your book saying, well, we need to rethink some
0:45.2	of this. I'm about, uh-oh. So, but, you know, just give us a little, I guess, biography or,
0:53.5	or what's your journey, what's your story? How did you, you're a little slightly older a little, I guess, biography or what's your journey?
0:54.6	What's your story?
0:55.3	How did you?
0:55.8	You're a little slightly older than me.
0:57.3	So you must have come of age as behaviorism was giving way to cognitive psychology.
1:02.5	And so you sort of saw that revolution.
1:04.3	And I'm wondering if you think we're in the middle of another one going in a different direction now.
1:09.6	Well, I, you've got me pegged.
1:12.2	I actually grew up as a Scenarian.
1:15.4	My initial training was doing experiments with pigeons and rats.
1:24.6	And what I came to see after I had started teaching at Swarthmore is that that framework, the behaviorist framework had a lot in common with the framework of microeconomics, although the languages were quite different.
1:43.0	Economists talk about rationality and scnerians had no use for anything like
1:48.3	rationality, but it was all about incentives driving behavior.
1:55.6	And so I wrote a book called The Battle for Human Nature almost 40 years ago that compared and criticized
	...

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