Why Humans Are The Most Irrational Animals » IAI TV

Aristotle talked about rationality as the distinguishing feature of humans compared to other animals. However, the author argues that humans are more irrational than any other animals.

Imagination plays a crucial role in making most of our important decisions. Which college to choose? Go to grad school or not? Which job offer to take? And so on. You made all of these decisions by imagining yourself in one of the two situations and then imagining yourself in the other and then comparing the two.

We have very little idea about just what situations we will find ourselves in. Our imagination is also influenced by films and Tv. 

When we make these grand decisions, we use imagination three times- we imagine what we imagine to be our future selves in imagined alternative scenarios. 

And none of these uses of imagination is particularly rational. Imagining our future selves is especially unreliable, as we systematically underestimate how much we will change in the future. And the scenarios we imagine ourselves in have very little to do with the actual situations we would find ourselves in.