etnobofin

Image: eco-photography

This week’s Rue des Entrepreneurs on France Inter took on the controversial topic of how humans actually make decisions. There were some notable concepts raised: essentially all the recent research throws most traditional assumptions of rationality out the window.

I liked this quote from Jon Elster about the absurdity of groupthink:

Conformity [of belief] can be rational, in the sense that if you observe a large number of people thinking like that, they must doubtless be correct. But if everyone forms their belief in the same way – by observing others – there is no “hard core” [of belief]. For example it’s possible to observe the following situation: where nobody really believes in a certain proposition, but everyone thinks everyone believes in it. And so everyone behaves as if they believe in it.
-Jon Elster, Professor of Rationality and Social Science at the Collège de France

“Le conformisme peut-être rationnel, dans le sens que si l’on observe que beaucoup de gens pensent comme ça, ils doivent sans doute avoir raison. Mais si tous ces autres forment leur croyance de la même manière, en observant autrui, alors il n’y a pas de “noyau dur”. Par exemple on peut constater la situation suivante: que personne ne croit dans la vérité d’une certaine proposition, mais chacun croit que tous les autres y croient. Donc tout le monde se comportent s’ils y croyaient.”
-Jon Elster, professeur au Collège de France, chaire « Rationalité et sciences sociales »

[Ed- thanks to Yann for his corrections to my French transcript]