Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters

by Steven Pinker

Rational ignorance is an example of the mind-bending paradoxes of reason explained by the political scientist Thomas Schelling in his 1960 classic The Strategy of Conflict.28 In some circumstances it can be rational to be not just ignorant but powerless, and, most perversely of all, irrational. In the game of Chicken, made famous in the James Dean classic Rebel Without a Cause, two teenage drivers approach each other at high speed on a narrow road and whoever swerves first loses face (he is the “chicken”).29 Since each one knows that the other does not want to die in a head-on crash, each may stay the course, knowing the other has to swerve first. Of course when both are “rational” in this way, it’s a recipe for disaster (a paradox of game theory we will return to in chapter 8). So is there a strategy that wins at Chicken? Yes—relinquish your ability to swerve by conspicuously locking the steering wheel, or by putting a brick on the gas pedal and climbing into the back seat, leaving the other guy no choice but to swerve. The player who lacks control wins. More precisely, the first player to lack control wins: if both lock their wheels simultaneously