The famous Les Halles de Paul Bocuse is a shopping mall of high-end products, incomprehensible to a non-Lyonnais unless you are an anthropologist studying the Lyonnais psyche as manifest in its irrational habits of food consumption.
So looking at rational and irrational voting habits, trends or behavior in terms of statistics misses the point.
We speculate that experiencing an urge to perform, or performing, irrational avoidance habits could potentially reinforce, or even engender, irrational fear.
However, it may be ultimately impossible to disentangle irrational beliefs from habit behavior, as these features might concurrently strengthen over time (e.g., as cognitive habits).
Worshipping deities would seem to be an irrational and wasteful habit, yet it has been found in all cultures.
Through the years there are titles, ranging from Getting to Yes to Predictably Irrational to 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which our readers return to time and again.
It said programmes categorised by the BBC as "news" featured discussions of presenters' recurring nightmares, celebrity lookalikes, music reviews, listeners' irrational hatreds and irritating habits.
They also have a habit of behaving like an irrational mob, "shutting down debate quite aggressively", argued Gordon Brown's former polling guru, and many of them only communicate with narrow groups of like-minded people.
No slouch at public shaming, Thoreau did his part to sustain that irrational equation, so robust in America, between eating habits and moral worth.
