In the early 1990s, Schiphol International Airport in Amsterdam faced an unprecedented hygiene crisis in its restrooms. Male passengers frequently caused heavy spillage while using the urinals, resulting in a cleaning nightmare and escalating facilities management costs.
To circumvent this gnawing problem, the airport cleaning department manager, Jos van Bedaf, devised an ingenious plan. He suggested etching a fly into the porcelain commode, positioned just above the drain. This simple implementation was carried out across the airport, and the results were stunning: spillage dropped by 80 per cent, and cleaning costs decreased by 8 per cent.
The etched fly tapped into the users’ subconscious hunter-gatherer instincts, triggering an automatic response to aim at the “prey.” This phenomenon aligns with what psychologist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman describes as System 1 thinking—rapid, instinctive, and automatic cognitive processing.
The need for hygiene in civilised societies — a rational need — was temporarily suspended by negligent humans, probably lost in the burden of stream-of-consciousness, reminiscent of James Joyce’s literary characters or the disjunct, chaotic musings in Eugene Ionesco’s “nonsense dramas.”
Ironically, a problem borne from human irrationality was resolved by cleverly engaging the same instinctive, irrational tendencies. Choosing to etch a fly was appropriate as it would have engendered guilt if it had been a butterfly or disgust if a cockroach. This simple, yet effective solution helped passengers continue wallowing in mindlessness and ruminate on existential questions such as “how did the universe begin?” or “who am I?” while facing the urinal, yet inadvertently targeting the fly.
A simple “nudge,” the theory made famous by behavioural economists and Nobel laureates Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, which essentially is a feature in the environment that attracted attention and altered behaviour. Soon, fly etchings, decals, and stickers appeared in airports around the world, such as JFK Terminal 4, Munich, Seattle, Moscow, Detroit, and Singapore, as well as in non-airport facilities, with the same impressive results.
Classical economists put forth the theory of Homo Economicus, the idea that humans are perfectly rational decision-makers who operate without information asymmetries or uncertainty. They assumed that individuals carefully weigh all available information before making choices, always acting in their own best interest.
This view was fundamentally challenged by the pioneering research of psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. In their influential work, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman and Tversky demonstrated that humans are not purely rational. Instead, decision-making is often shaped by cognitive biases stemming from the architecture of human thought. Structured reasoning is frequently overridden by emotions, leading people to adopt decisions that may not be logically optimal.
Kahneman introduced the concept of two distinct modes of thinking: System I and System II. System I thinking is characterised by rapid, instinctive, and emotional responses. It is intuitive, automatic, and driven by associative memory, helping individuals react quickly to danger or perform routine activities such as reading, driving, or solving simple math problems like “10 x 5” or “20 + 10.”
In contrast, System II thinking is slow, deliberate, and logical. It requires effort and is associated with a sense of agency, allowing humans to undertake complex tasks such as designing bridges and skyscrapers, launching space missions, or developing advanced technology. System II underpins the monumental achievements of human civilisation, from agricultural societies to the creation of supercomputers and artificial intelligence.
Irrationality arises when humans tend to act impulsively on emotional cues and heuristics (mental shortcuts) rather than designing solutions through slow, protracted thought processes, discussions and deliberations. The Cold War strategy of arming the Mujahedin against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan largely followed the maxim, “my enemy’s enemy is my friend,” without considering the long-term ramifications of the rise of Islamic radicalism and the Taliban forces, who later became anti-American and anti-imperialist, declaring war against Western civilisation.
The hasty and botched implementation of demonetisation in India not only turned out to be an economic debacle with greater social costs and far fewer accomplishments of the intended objectives, but also serves as a classic case study of a System 1 mass populist policy push made in the absence of critical examination and reasoned debate.
These geopolitical events, punctuated by System I thinking, could be juxtaposed with multilateral treaties and deals such as the carefully formulated JCPOA — known as the Iran nuclear deal — and the existentially relevant Paris Climate Accord, which involve multidimensional System II analysis, scientific study, intense negotiations, and consensus.
It is disheartening to witness the key initiator, the United States, retracting on the commitment, with President Trump succumbing to impulsive political appeasement of the MAGAverse, denouncing the climate crisis as “a cheap Chinese hoax,” and being obsessed with shredding any legacy of the Obama administration’s signature diplomatic achievements.
This fundamental attribution error (FAE) refers to the bias that leads us to blame others’ actions on their character but to excuse our own as circumstantial. For example, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is often explained by Putin’s autocratic personality and imperial expansionary ambitions rather than situational factors like NATO’s eastward enlargement, despite the broader context possibly playing a significant role.
Some states justify their actions through historical or religious narratives. Israel’s settlement expansion and displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank are often explained as fulfilling a biblical covenant dating back thousands of years. Supporters of Zionism use this rationale to support Israel’s illegal occupation under Benjamin Netanyahu, trampling international law and human rights with impunity.
This selective interpretation — condemning one set of actions based on perceived personal failings while excusing another through appeals to destiny or circumstance — creates a complex riddle for the global community with a sanctimonious commitment to the “rule of law.”
Marketers use cognitive biases, such as anchoring and framing, to shape buying decisions. For example, listing a product as “Was $799, now $499” leverages the original price as an anchor, making $499 seem like a bargain. To boost sales of a $499 item, marketers may resort to the “Goldilocks Effect” by introducing versions at $425 and $699 with conspicuous feature differentiation, encouraging customers to choose the mid-priced option.
Framing a marketing message offers powerful cues into the workings of the human mind and into how consumers receive and process it. When framing leverages the inherent “Loss Aversion” bias — our tendency to strongly prefer avoiding losses over acquiring equivalent gains — it becomes even more compelling.
For instance, messages such as “Only two left” capitalise on the scarcity effect, generating a sense of urgency and eliciting a “Fear of Missing Out” (FOMO) response. This tactic effectively nudges consumers toward immediate action by motivating them to avoid losing out on a perceived opportunity.
Similarly, the way information is framed can dramatically affect consumer perception. An advertisement that states a product is “95% fat-free” is likely to be more appealing than one that says it contains “only 5% fat,” even though both statements are objectively identical and true.
Framing influences more than just product descriptions. In the late 1920s, Edward Bernays, known as the father of public relations, helped the American Tobacco Company increase cigarette sales by launching the “Torch of Freedom” campaign. He hired models to publicly smoke cigarettes, framing it as a symbol of feminist liberation, challenging prevailing cultural taboos and asserting women’s independence from male dominance.
The public spectacle, positioned as a march for freedom from male tyranny, was a calculated effort to “manufacture consent” and reframe the act of smoking as an act of empowerment. This reframing overshadowed emerging medical evidence of the health risks associated with smoking, and the campaign’s success had tragic consequences. Today, over 200,000 women die annually in the United States from diseases attributable to smoking, with millions more having lost their lives since the smoking revolution ignited on the streets of New York.
The behavioural economist Dan Ariely has shown that people are “predictably irrational,” even when logical incentives are present. This gap between incentives and choices stems from influences like social norms, culture, emotions, perceived relative value, and expectations shaped by experience.
A striking example is when Williams Sonoma introduced a bread machine; consumer response was tepid, and sales were low. In response, the company added a more expensive deluxe model, priced at a 50 per cent premium. This dramatically altered consumer perception; they made the original seem like a bargain, quickly boosting its sales.
His studies have also unravelled peculiar aspects of human cognition pertinent to the affinity for anything offered free of cost. People will endure serpentine queues to avail of a free product, however inferior, compared to another that is far superior in quality and reasonably priced. Human irrationality is manifest in “discounting the future”, a trap, which explains why people text and drive, defer a gym membership for gratification in the ‘now, ’ risking adverse consequences in the future.
Atheists aver that belief in God is a pinnacle of human irrationality through the suspension of all critical faculties. They are critical of “faith” being a construct of the human mind, conjured up in the absence of rational explanations before the era of scientific materialism.
Theoretical physicists like Lawrence Krauss advocate the origin of our phenomenal universe from nothing. ‘Nothing,’ indubitably must pertain to a universe devoid of the substratum of quantum field gravitational forces and the inscrutable dark energy and dark matter.
It leads to a naked singularity, which is the key postulate of the Big Bang Theory. Since no empirical evidence exists that nothing produces something, the starting point of science is speculative, nonaxiomatic and unscientific. It hovers in the uncharted territories of faith of a different kind, though etymologically similar.
Human rationality is futile in the ontological sphere, in what Donald Rumsfeld famously coined as “the unknown unknowns.” Inescapably, this “bounded rationality” is transmitted into the world of humans, impacting all facets of human cognition and interaction.
Immanuel Kant, one of the masters of the Enlightenment, espoused this predicament in his monumental work, Critique of Pure Reason. He introduced insightful concepts such as “phenomena” and “noumena” as the structural limit of human cognition.
While ‘phenomena’ explain the “how” of the universe, its physical laws and processes that enable it to function with clockwork precision, “noumena” traverses the metaphysical realms of “why is there something rather than nothing,” which, essentially for theists, is seeking the mind of God. John Lennox, Oxford University mathematician and philosopher of science, makes a compelling argument that “confusing mechanism with agency” is a category mistake by atheists.
While much of the discussion around human cognition highlights our inherent biases and the prevalence of irrational decision-making, not all scholars view these tendencies with complete pessimism. Canadian psychologist Steven Pinker offers a more nuanced perspective. He acknowledges that humans are prone to irrationality at the individual level — but do better at the institutional and societal collective — a tendency rooted in evolutionary pressures that favoured survival and fitness over the pursuit of truth.
Pinker suggests that human irrationality could be reduced through education, especially by understanding probability and game theory. Education in these areas, Pinker suggests, equips individuals with tools to better evaluate risks, outcomes, and strategic interactions, thereby improving decision-making processes.
Game theory has, in fact, influenced a generation of diplomats. Through the work of American economist Thomas Schelling and through classic models such as the “Game of Chicken” and the “Prisoner’s Dilemma,” game theory has not only illuminated the complexities of strategic interactions but has also had significant, sometimes troubling, impacts on international relations. During the Cold War, the application of game theory contributed to political manoeuvring that brought the world perilously close to mutual destruction and to nuclear brinkmanship.
One of the compelling explorations of human subjectivity and rationality is found in the cult movie “Rashomon,” directed by Akira Kurosawa. The plot centres around the murder of a samurai, as recounted by four different witnesses: the bandit, the samurai himself (through a medium), the samurai’s wife, and a woodcutter. Each of these individuals describes the events in the courtroom from their unique perspectives, their contradictory testimonies shaped by personal biases, heuristics, emotional motivations, and self-interest.
The courtroom drama is later reinterpreted by a priest, a commoner, and the woodcutter himself, when they are huddled at the Rashomon Gate during a storm in Kyoto. Still, rationality remains elusive in their discourse. All characters in the movie represent the broader cross-section of humanity, who grapple with the illusion of objectivity and moral rationalisation of their narratives. The Rashomon Gate is the muted spectator, symbolic of the threshold between chaos and meaning.
-30-
Copyright©Madras Courier, All Rights Reserved. You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from madrascourier.com and redistribute by email, post to the web, mobile phone or social media.Please send in your feed back and comments to [email protected]
