ReviewTrends in cognitive sciences2022
Efficiently irrational: deciphering the riddle of human choice.
Review in Trends in cognitive sciences, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 15 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- Changing University Students' Habit Strength Towards Alcohol Consumption Using Affectively and Cognitively Framed Messages.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Action repetition biases choice in context-dependent decision-making.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Article
- People display consistent recency and primacy effects in behavior and neural activity across perceptual and value-based judgments.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2025Article
- Early versus late noise differentially enhances or degrades context-dependent choice.Nature communications · 2025Article
- The Relationship Among Range Adaptation, Social Anhedonia, and Social Functioning: A Combined Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy and Resting-State fMRI Study.Schizophrenia bulletin · 2025Article
- Efficient numerosity estimation under limited time.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Social implications of coexistence of CAVs and human drivers in the context of route choice.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Rational inattention in neural coding for economic choice.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Modelling dataset bias in machine-learned theories of economic decision-making.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
- Electrophysiological population dynamics reveal context dependencies during decision making in human frontal cortex.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Worth the Work? Monkeys Discount Rewards by a Subjective Adapting Effort Cost.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
- Article
- Critical tests of fuzzy trace theory in brain and behavior: uncertainty across time, probability, and development.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2023Article
- Nudging Strategies for Arable Land Protection Behavior in China.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
Abstract
For the past half-century, cognitive and social scientists have struggled with the irrationalities of human choice behavior; people consistently make choices that are logically inconsistent. Is human choice behavior evolutionarily adaptive or is it an inefficient patchwork of competing mechanisms? In this review, I present an interdisciplinary synthesis arguing for a novel interpretation: choice is efficiently irrational. Connecting findings across disciplines suggests that observed choice behavior reflects a precise optimization of the trade-off between the costs of increasing the precision of the choice mechanism and the declining benefits that come as precision increases. Under these constraints, a rationally imprecise strategy emerges that works toward optimal efficiency rather than toward optimal rationality. This approach rationalizes many of the puzzling inconsistencies of human choice behavior, explaining why these inconsistencies arise as an optimizing solution in biological choosers.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.