How do psychology, economics, philosophy, sociology, and political science explain irrational human behavior?
Why is human behavior irrational? Representatives of different sciences answer this question in different ways. In some cases, “irrational” is understood as “illogical”, and so the term is usually translated into Armenian (but in some cases, as we will see, it is not the same, so in this article I prefer to use the international term). From the point of view of psychologists, first of all, psychoanalysts, the explanation is connected with the opposition of the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious. According to that, the conscious is what is in front of our eyes, the preconscious is not in front of our eyes, but it can appear there (as soon as we start thinking about it), and the unconscious creates certain barriers, defense mechanisms for that “appearance.” The author of this theory, Sigmund Freud, uses the word “censorship” as a metaphor for a barrier.
Interestingly, Freud spoke of Russian censorship in World War I, although his country, Austria-Hungary, was no better. The unconscious blocks, for example, the entry of rational arguments into consciousness. This is how idols and “enemy images” are created, the information about their shortcomings or advantages is not brought to a rational level. Economists of the 20th and 21st centuries took Freud’s idea to explain, in particular, consumer behavior. There is no rational explanation for why people buy some useless, even harmful product (such as tobacco), use it, and then regret it, often flogging themselves.
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Economist Thomas Schelling explains this by the presence of strong, weak selves in a person. The second has a shorter “horizon” (“I will smoke one”), the first has a longer horizon (“I will not die of cancer”). Immediately after smoking, the strong “I” dominates (“I will never smoke again”), but as time goes on, the weak “I” rises (“no one has died from one cigarette yet”). To promote a strong self, people make public promises to quit smoking so that when they smoke, they lose something other than their health, say, the respect of those around them. In political science, however, this mechanism does not always work. Politicians have repeatedly broken their promises, but continue to enjoy popularity. Harry Frankfurt showed a similar approach in philosophy, dividing the desires into first and second categories: 1) I am the person who wants to smoke or go online for a minute, 2) I am the person who wants to overcome those desires. Will is thus manifested in the second type of desire, in rational aspirations. The most unique explanation of irrational human behavior in sociology is given by the American friend Irving Hoffman, who tries to combine the views of the same Freud with the classical ideas of his profession, which were put forward by Emil Durheim.
According to the latter, there is nothing in consciousness that does not exist in society. For example, the “censorship” of the unconscious, according to Durheim, can occur only because society sets such standards for people. Based on that starting point, Hoffman puts forward the idea of social roles. Each person has as many selves as he or she plays, and these, in turn, depend on the number of groups that the person values. These are the masks that can eventually lead to irrational behavior, because, according to Hoffman, these masks become so “close” to the human face that they become more real than the imaginary self that people have that they ideally strive to be. In other words, the impression that people try to leave on other people, “authoritative” groups, becomes stronger than the real “I”.
Hoffman’s major work is entitled Self-Presentation to Others in Everyday Life, in which he makes extensive use of theatrical metaphors. Hoffman is also interested in the “arbitrary self-expression” by which people convey information about themselves using certain symbols, the “spontaneous” self-expression when people, for example, betray themselves by some steps, involuntarily showing that they do not correspond to their declared ambitions. By putting on this or that mask, a person has to carefully hide everything that contradicts his chosen role. For example, a person claiming to be highly intellectual did not admit that he spends 6 hours a day following social media posts. “Our status is based on a clear picture of the world, while the meaning of our personal identity lies in the depths of that picture,” Hoffman wrote. In political science, the subtle difference between “rational” and “logic” is taken into account.
The behavior of politicians and other participants in the process may not be rational, but logical. There may be a situation where the goals are not rational (for example, the creation of the Third Reich or the Third Rome), but the means used for them are logical; they have their own internal logic. In that sense, the actions of the current government and the opposition in Armenia, in my opinion, are neither rational nor reasonable. In general, the study of irrational behavior of people in the 21st century, in the context of the unprecedented development of information technology, the “pressure” of globalization, I consider the number one problem of sociologists. Especially in Armenia.
Aram Abrahamyan
Aravot Daily, May 3, 2022
