Some researchers say that while they must occasionally fight the impulse to write off ordinary people as fools, they also sometimes find that the lay individual's assessment of risk, while perhaps not strictly rational, has something that mere numbers cannot catch.
Commercial advertisers know that consumers decide on purchases for a wide variety of reasons, from emotional to rational: because something catches their eye in the checkout, or because they have done careful research and follow an "information-driven process," or something in between (Wells et al. 2006).
If you are a rational 20-something without insurance now, would you rather shell out $2,500 a year to buy a lost-cost policy or pay a fine that is less than one-third of that?
When he was not saying something rational, he was sounding a tad hysterical.
Thus, a single integer controls whether the functions on the surface are rational, elliptic, or something else.
"It wasn't necessarily something rational or calculated, and he has a lot of regrets about it," she said.
The struggle of a highly intelligent man to find a rational explanation for something inexplicable inside himself could make fascinating reading, if it was thoughtfully organized.
The addicts may not be in a fit state of mind to give it, so Harris leaves it to doctors to judge whether their patient is able to make a rational decision about something as life-changing as sterilisation.
Allen made something rational out of the title character (played with icy conviction by Tippi Hedren), a sexually repressed kleptomaniac with a hysterical fear of thunderstorms and the colour red.
The whole tidy ecosystem of cause and effect — the belief that there is something rational and meritocratic about high finance — has burned away along with the billions of dollars spent to bail out its chief practitioners.
