Maps of rationality: Historical and theoretical perspectives

Abstract

Rationality has been one of the most important theoretical concepts in cognitive science. Up until now, plenty of rationality concepts have been proposed to represent human decision-making processes. This paper aims to draw a map of rationality in psychology and cognitive sciences literature by clarifying their theoretical features, functions, and similarities. In doing so, this paper reviewed many rationality concepts proposed in the pieces of literature on higher cognition, including reasoning or judgment and decision making. It explained how these rationality concepts explained biases in human thinking and how they have changed through a history of judgment and decision-making research. This paper pointed out that rationality is now considered the goal of or evidence for cognitive model and that recent rationality concepts treat decision making as resolving trade-off between plural conflicting aims such as expected utility and computational efficiency, through the review of rationality concept in reasoning and judgment and decision-making literature.