People might demonstrate isolated transactional irrationality but they tend to be systemically rational.

The academy can be extremely narrow-minded, intolerant and faddish, especially in the social sciences. It matters not how many research failures are revealed, they continue dogmatically believing in whatever trendy thought has recently emerged at the expense of real world experience.

One trend in the past five years or so has been the emerging conviction, trumpeted in books and articles, that the human mind is irredeemably illogical, irrational and incapable of consistent thought. Much of this depends on lab experiments on small numbers of usually middle class, affluent twenty-year olds, conducted under unrealistic conditions.

An example has been the joy with which sociologists greeted the Implicit Attitude Test which seemed to reveal that everyone was strongly biased against African-Americans. Sociologists being ideologues primarily from the Frankfurt School of reformed Marxism and broadly committed to critical theory celebrated the discovery of what they wanted to be true. But then it emerged that African-Americans taking the test were also biased against African-Americans. Then it was discovered that IAT results had no correlation to observed behaviors outside the lab environment. IAT is dying a slow death but cognitive pollution, once spread in the public discourse, like oil from a shipwrecked tanker, sticks around a long time.

At last we have a journalist/researcher willing to declare, in the context of the faddish conviction that all humans are irrational, that the emperor has no clothes. From The Irrational Idea That Humans Are Mostly Irrational by Paul Bloom.

My position on the irrationality claim is that indeed there are circumstances where humans are irrational but that the appearance of irrationality usually arises from biases on the part of the researcher, and/or because the goals and priorities of the subject are not understood, and/or because the context in which the decision is being made is not understood.

Bloom goes along with some of this.

My bet is that the relevant factor in variation in rationality, including moral reasoning, is not about different types of people, but different types of situations. If you want to see people at their stupidest, check out national politics, which is replete with us-vs.-them dynamics and virtue signaling, and where the cost of having silly views is harmless. Unless I’m a member of a tiny, powerful community, my beliefs about climate change or the arms deal with Iran will have no effect on the world, and so it’s not surprising that people don't work so hard to get those sorts of facts right.

It’s revelatory, then, that we do much better when the stakes are high, where being rational really matters. If I have the wrong theory of how to make scrambled eggs, they will come out too dry; if I have the wrong everyday morality, I will hurt those I love. So if you’re curious about people’s capacity for reasoning, don’t look at cases where being correct doesn’t matter and where it’s all about affiliation. Rather, look at how people cope in everyday life.

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Look at the discussions that adults have over whether to buy a house or where to send their kids to school, or consider the social negotiations that occur among friends deciding where to go for dinner, planning a hike, or figuring out how to help someone who just had a baby. Or even look at a different sort of politics—the type of politics where individuals might actually make a difference, such as a town hall meeting where people discuss zoning regulations and where to put a stop sign.

My own experience is that the level of rational discourse in these situations is high. People might be self-interested, but they know that they are involved in decisions that matter, so they work to exercise their rational capacities: They make arguments, express ideas, and are receptive to the arguments and ideas of others. They sometimes even change their minds.

I like his point about the importance, not just of context, but of consequentiality. The more consequential the outcome, the more people invest in making informed decisions.

Blooms point ties to the other recently popular notion that voters are irrational and fail to vote their own interests. The higher the level of the election, the less critical it is to make a well-informed decision because of the less degree of impact within the election (one vote out of however many), as well as the weak relationship between national politician statements and actions. There is no point in investing time and effort becoming mini-experts, as some academics would wish, if the causal relationship between investment and outcome is so weak.

Know the goals, know the proxy measures used, know the priorities, know the perceived trade-offs among goals, know the context, know the relative costs - only then do you even begin to be in a position to consider whether irrationality is in play. Short of that, as a talking head, all you are doing is substituting your opinions and biases over everyone else's interpretations. It is a totalitarian/authoritarian mindset rather than a classical liberal one in which everyone is deemed to have equal agency and respect.