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This chapter examines the relation between rational/irrational thinking and behavior. It reviews studies assessing the irrational beliefs-dysfunctional/maladaptive behavior relationship, and focused mainly on research that evaluates the four types of beliefs separately, rather than global irrationality. Despite an obvious degree of specificity in the behavioral consequences of individual irrational beliefs, there is also an overlap in their effects (e.g., the aggressive expression of anger is related to high levels of low frustration tolerance, self-downing, and demandingness). This is not surprising considering the hypothesized mutual interdependence among diverse irrational beliefs.

In 1958 Albert Ellis published “Rational Psychotherapy,” a brief paper marking the beginning of cognitive therapies. As the therapy developed and he gained followers, he changed the name to “rational-emotive therapy,” and then to “rational-emotive behavior therapy” (REBT). This chapter looks at the logical and historical background to Ellis's use of rational, and why this use is so relevant in understanding the distinctive importance of REBT. It starts by exploring the different uses of the word that give rise to its different meanings. It then brings out two fundamental and apparently contrasting usages, referred to here as disciplinary and emancipatory rationality. Finally, it draws on the tension between these usages to display the full complexity of Ellis's use of the word rational, and to put some of the philosophical criticisms of Ellis and REBT into perspective.

There has been an increasing interest in neurobiological analyses of the causes of behavior among many practitioners of criminal law. In some institutional circles this has crystallized as an interest in providing a physical method for classifying the actions of human agents according to preexisting social–legal categories. The impetus driving this search for neurobiological classification tools stems from both the longstanding Western legal requirement that actors be held accountable only for those voluntary actions which are preceded by what is termed a culpable mental state and the longstanding legal difficulty in establishing culpable mental state at trial. Thus a pressing question for many legal practitioners is whether existing neurobiological techniques or data can be used to identify the socially defined categories that guide law and punishment. Based on modern epistemological views of natural scientists and neurobiological evidence, this chapter suggests that there is no meaningful sense in which the possible states of the brain can be reduced to a standard psycho–legal state. Current understanding suggests that at an empirical neurobiological level, the distinctions employed by the criminal justice system may be nearly meaningless.

This chapter proposes a theoretical model that could potentially increase our understanding of the effects of irrational beliefs on health outcomes. It has been written that REBT “is perhaps the only therapeutic system that directly tackles our confrontation with reality.” Also as humans cannot help but be all too aware, physical suffering is an inextricable part of reality. REBT arms us in our struggle with this aspect of reality by providing us with two weapons: a willingness to accept reality, combined with an unwillingness to accept our irrational interpretations of that reality.

Michael Watkins has said that a cognitive theory “is a bit like someone else’s toothbrush—it is fine for the individual’s use, but for the rest of us…well, we would just rather not, thank you.” To say whether people are behaving rationally requires a definition of what it means to behave rationally, and like a toothbrush everyone has their own. This chapter, defines rational behavior as follows: To behave rationally in some context is to display behavior that corresponds to a normative standard of behavior for that context. The choice of the standard determines what constitutes rational behavior. This chapter explores the roots of the idea that behavior that is rational in natural environments may not necessarily be rational in the peculiar environments that experimental psychologists concoct.

This chapter examines the intelligence and rational behaviour in four bottlenose dolphins evidenced by their cognitive accomplishments. It describes the dolphins' trained facility in understanding symbolic gestures and evaluates whether this capacity to understand symbolic gestures is related to the rational responses dolphins display. It explains that intelligence is manifested in behavioural flexibility and intelligently flexible behaviour provides the foundation for rational behaviour.

Social rationality is a specific form of ecological rationality, one in which the environment consists of other humans. The program of social rationality explains human judgment and decision making in terms of the structure of social environments. This chapter illustrates how behaviors that look irrational from an individualistic point of view can turn out to be well adapted to a specific social environment. Social environments foster different strategies than physical environments, such as imitation instead of deliberation, and demand attention to information that is unique to social interaction, such as cues that could reveal that one is being cheated or bluffed. The examples demonstrate that only by referring to something external to the rules or axioms, such as social objectives, values, and norms, can one decide whether an axiom or choice rule entails rational behavior.

This chapter takes on how these supernatural or religious beliefs are reasonable enough for people to allow this supernaturalism to affect their behaviour, especially in terms of commitment. It points out how we must first recognize the limitations of the scientific method before we use it as a basis of knowledge for rational behaviour. This chapter discusses the elements of decision making to further explain how some Christians take their religious beliefs into account when making ordinary everyday decisions. Because decisions are possibly based on whatever values that are instilled with beliefs, the chapter also introduces a ‘game’ theory to emphasize conflicts that decision makers face.

This chapter examines the heuristic and theoretical importance of a distinction between rational and associative behaviour in animals in the case of imitation in the Japanese quail. It suggests that there is no Rubicon between associative and rational processes to be crossed and that evolution adds specific new cognitive capacities by tinkering with previous mechanisms. It proposes that research should refocus on specific explanations of how animals do specific things, rather than on the presence or absence of some general or ideal form of rationality that contrasts with associative mechanisms.

This chapter examines the evolution of rationality and metacognition in non-human animals. It charts the adaptive steps that lead from merely biologically rational behaviour to human reasoning processes, and clarifies the critical functions of metacognitive processes in this genesis. It argues that variable, complex environments exert strong selective pressure for flexible behaviour and adaptive control structures evolve in response to this pressure.

This chapter lays out the general theory of quantal response equilibrium (QRE) for normal-form games. It starts with the reduced-form approach to QR, based on the direct specification of “regular” quantal or smoothed best-response functions required to satisfy four intuitive axioms of stochastic choice. A simple asymmetric matching pennies game is used to illustrate these ideas and show that QRE imposes strong restrictions on the data, even without parametric assumptions on the quantal response functions. Particular attention is given to the logit QRE, since it is the most commonly used approach taken when QRE is applied to experimental or other data. The discussion includes the topological and limiting properties of logit QRE and connections with refinement concepts. QRE is also related to several other equilibrium models of imperfectly rational behavior in games, including a game-theoretic equilibrium version of Luce's (1959) model of individual choice, Rosenthal's (1989) linear response model, and Van Damme's (1987) control cost model; these connections are explained in the chapter.

Emotions can be defined as states elicited by instrumental reinforcers, that is, by rewards and punishers. Because of its roles in processing rewards and punishers, the orbitofrontal cortex is therefore the key brain region in emotion. Cognition can have a top-down biasing effect on the emotion-related systems in the orbitofrontal cortex. In addition to the emotional route to behavior, there is also a rational route to behavior involving reasoning, which involves systems outside the orbitofrontal cortex. Individual differences in sensitivity to rewards and punishers also provide a foundation for understanding many aspects of personality. The functions of the orbitofrontal cortex in emotion are compared with those of the amygdala, which it is argued becomes overshadowed by the orbitofrontal cortex in humans. Indeed, a current topic of interest is that the orbitofrontal cortex appears to be involved much more in subjective aspects of emotion in humans than the amygdala.

This chapter explores the relationship between computational models of rational behavior and metareasoning. It examines several approaches to bounded rationality, dividing them into four broad classes: heuristic search, approximate modeling, optimal metareasoning, and bounded optimality. The approach based on optimal metareasoning seems particularly attractive because it is both relatively easy to implement and provides some formal guarantees about the behavior of the agent. The chapter considers several instantiations of this approach using anytime algorithms and provides a characterization of the relationship between the object-level and metareasoning components. These examples show that metareasoning plays an important role in this particular approach to bounded rationality.

Members of all three political parties suggested that Governor Hernández-Colón was primarily interested in sending Congress a message—and a cultural one at that. Such an intent, if true, is still inconsistent with classic assumptions of a political party’s rational behavior. But there is an alternative logical explanation, within the rational choice framework, to Downs’s assumption of vote-maximizing behavior. As George Tsebelis contended, a nested game consists of public-facing game masking another game outside the limelight. Under this proposal a decision, even an unpopular one that costs an election, is logical so long as it furthers an actor’s non-electoral goals. In this case the PPD sought to wave the banner of Puerto Rican identity, even in its soft-core cultural form, to thwart their statehood foes in the one body empowered to change the island’s status—the US Congress.

This chapter examines early attempts to overturn the 1902 official bilingual law. The PIP passionately favored such a move, but with few legislative seats any change in language policy would be up to the two larger parties. Concerned that Congress might disapprove of a statehood applicant jettisoning English as an official language, the pro-statehood PNP had no interest in changing this law. That left the matter completely up to the PPD. During the 1970s and 1980s a few PPD lawmakers proposed bills, but in keeping with a classic Downsian vote-maximizing strategy the party’s leadership consistently rejected the idea. With an eye on the next election, the PPD’s behavior was consistent with standard models of rational political behavior.