Resource-rational analysis will find friends among historians. It accords closely with an operating assumption in the field: When people seem to act against their own interests, they may be doing so in light of priorities and constraints that aren't obvious to outsiders – or even to themselves. And historians are likely to join Lieder and Griffiths in rejecting the idea of a single, ideal Rationality in favor of different “rationalities” at work in the world (d'Avray Reference d'Avray2010).
The challenge, as Lieder and Griffiths know, is to characterize those rationalities – that is, to identify the priorities and constraints that shape specific choices. To do so, we argue, requires going beyond the fields Lieder and Griffiths invoke (psychology, economics, neuroscience, and linguistics) and looking at the contexts in which choices are actually made. We suggest history is a useful tool for doing that. History is full of examples of conscious and non-conscious factors shaping specific decisions, including instances that are baffling at first but that historical analysis helps to clarify. To take an iconic example: Why would a group of printshop apprentices murder domesticated cats in response to working conditions in old-regime France? Historians have unearthed hidden factors to explain this and other puzzles (Darnton Reference Darnton1984, cf. Pettit Reference Pettit2017).
They do so by identifying situation-specific decision mechanisms, which is just the sort of thing Lieder and Griffiths are after. Attention to context, in other words, promises to help practitioners of resource-rational analysis by altering its first step (as outlined on p. 4). Cases in cultural history suggest that identifying “a problem and its solution” is not as simple as it seems – often because the very nature of a “problem” is up for grabs. Here, we present two such cases that reveal how resource rationality is as cultural as it is cognitive.
The first case is a classic example of perplexing decision-making. In the late antique and early medieval West (roughly 350–950 CE), rich and middling donors founded hundreds of monasteries, made small gifts to local churches, built shrines to their favorite saints, paid for lighting so that certain sacred spaces would be perpetually illuminated, and arranged for prayers to be sung in honor of themselves or their families. Their gestures might seem like bad decisions. Some of the donors’ heirs certainly thought so. But Christians actually had reasons to spend their lands and treasure in this way. Being generous to the poor (or to the clergy who cared for the poor) could create political capital: elites were seen as more deserving of political power when they showed concern for people with less of it. Christians also believed that this kind of spending was actually an investment that they would recoup in the afterlife. Not only were their donations not a waste of money. They were motivated by the sense that God's unique power made it possible to connect the economies of earth and heaven (Brown Reference Brown2012; Reference Brown2015; Kreiner Reference Kreiner2014; Wood Reference Wood2013).
What we count as resources, and what we consider rational uses of those resources, will change over time. But even more fundamentally, this example of Christian expenditure points to the fact that the moments when we ask ourselves, “Should we spend these resources, and how?” are historically determined. We are cued by our culture to diagnose dilemmas. Giving land to a church had not always been perceived as a solution to a problem. The “problem” itself – the recognition that there was a choice to confront about profit, with different outcomes to consider – had not always existed. It took centuries of preaching, arguing, and storytelling to get to the point where an elite person could be expected to see the choice to donate (or not) as a possible response to a self-evident challenge.
If the lesson of early Christian charity is that new behaviors can eclipse the rationality of older ones, the second case shows that the meanings of problems and solutions can change under our feet. This case centers on the idea of “conspicuous consumption” made famous by Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class (Veblen Reference Veblen1899). Drawing on evolutionary biology, Veblen argued that seemingly simple consumer decisions were in fact elaborate performances meant to reveal our adaptive fitness (Raymer Reference Raymer2013). Buying a fancy watch, for instance, wasn't (just) a solution to the problem of telling time. It was also, according to Veblen, a solution to a much deeper, unrecognized problem: signaling strength to potential competitors and mates.
This view of decision-making was controversial, to say the least. Criticisms came from all political and intellectual sides (Tilman Reference Tilman1991), and even Veblen's fans deemed him (as one biographer put it) “the bard of savagery” (Diggins Reference Diggins1978). But the point stuck: economic choices – and indeed, choices in general – often solve problems we are not even aware of. On the surface, consumption seemed like a straightforward negotiation between supply and demand; the resource-rationality of a purchase appeared self-evident. The effect of Veblen's argument was to complicate how economic decisions were defined as problems and solutions. Even if his theory was wrong in the particulars, its historical emergence is a reminder that resource-rational analysis depends on ideas (consumer preference, game theory) with their own histories.
We present these case studies not to deflate the value of resource-rational analysis but rather to enrich it. History can help capture the stranger aspects of human cognition, by drawing attention to the ways that people have come to count (or not count) certain things as problems, choices, and solutions in the first place. And if resource-rational analysis achieves wider recognition, an attention to how “problems” and “solutions” are defined could have an intriguing secondary effect. In the hands of actual people making actual decisions, it could feed into the very processes that Lieder and Griffiths document. That is, resource-rational analysis could be an engine, not a camera (MacKenzie Reference MacKenzie2006), altering how people understand the problems they face and the solutions available to them.
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Resource-rational analysis will find friends among historians. It accords closely with an operating assumption in the field: When people seem to act against their own interests, they may be doing so in light of priorities and constraints that aren't obvious to outsiders – or even to themselves. And historians are likely to join Lieder and Griffiths in rejecting the idea of a single, ideal Rationality in favor of different “rationalities” at work in the world (d'Avray Reference d'Avray2010).
The challenge, as Lieder and Griffiths know, is to characterize those rationalities – that is, to identify the priorities and constraints that shape specific choices. To do so, we argue, requires going beyond the fields Lieder and Griffiths invoke (psychology, economics, neuroscience, and linguistics) and looking at the contexts in which choices are actually made. We suggest history is a useful tool for doing that. History is full of examples of conscious and non-conscious factors shaping specific decisions, including instances that are baffling at first but that historical analysis helps to clarify. To take an iconic example: Why would a group of printshop apprentices murder domesticated cats in response to working conditions in old-regime France? Historians have unearthed hidden factors to explain this and other puzzles (Darnton Reference Darnton1984, cf. Pettit Reference Pettit2017).
They do so by identifying situation-specific decision mechanisms, which is just the sort of thing Lieder and Griffiths are after. Attention to context, in other words, promises to help practitioners of resource-rational analysis by altering its first step (as outlined on p. 4). Cases in cultural history suggest that identifying “a problem and its solution” is not as simple as it seems – often because the very nature of a “problem” is up for grabs. Here, we present two such cases that reveal how resource rationality is as cultural as it is cognitive.
The first case is a classic example of perplexing decision-making. In the late antique and early medieval West (roughly 350–950 CE), rich and middling donors founded hundreds of monasteries, made small gifts to local churches, built shrines to their favorite saints, paid for lighting so that certain sacred spaces would be perpetually illuminated, and arranged for prayers to be sung in honor of themselves or their families. Their gestures might seem like bad decisions. Some of the donors’ heirs certainly thought so. But Christians actually had reasons to spend their lands and treasure in this way. Being generous to the poor (or to the clergy who cared for the poor) could create political capital: elites were seen as more deserving of political power when they showed concern for people with less of it. Christians also believed that this kind of spending was actually an investment that they would recoup in the afterlife. Not only were their donations not a waste of money. They were motivated by the sense that God's unique power made it possible to connect the economies of earth and heaven (Brown Reference Brown2012; Reference Brown2015; Kreiner Reference Kreiner2014; Wood Reference Wood2013).
What we count as resources, and what we consider rational uses of those resources, will change over time. But even more fundamentally, this example of Christian expenditure points to the fact that the moments when we ask ourselves, “Should we spend these resources, and how?” are historically determined. We are cued by our culture to diagnose dilemmas. Giving land to a church had not always been perceived as a solution to a problem. The “problem” itself – the recognition that there was a choice to confront about profit, with different outcomes to consider – had not always existed. It took centuries of preaching, arguing, and storytelling to get to the point where an elite person could be expected to see the choice to donate (or not) as a possible response to a self-evident challenge.
If the lesson of early Christian charity is that new behaviors can eclipse the rationality of older ones, the second case shows that the meanings of problems and solutions can change under our feet. This case centers on the idea of “conspicuous consumption” made famous by Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class (Veblen Reference Veblen1899). Drawing on evolutionary biology, Veblen argued that seemingly simple consumer decisions were in fact elaborate performances meant to reveal our adaptive fitness (Raymer Reference Raymer2013). Buying a fancy watch, for instance, wasn't (just) a solution to the problem of telling time. It was also, according to Veblen, a solution to a much deeper, unrecognized problem: signaling strength to potential competitors and mates.
This view of decision-making was controversial, to say the least. Criticisms came from all political and intellectual sides (Tilman Reference Tilman1991), and even Veblen's fans deemed him (as one biographer put it) “the bard of savagery” (Diggins Reference Diggins1978). But the point stuck: economic choices – and indeed, choices in general – often solve problems we are not even aware of. On the surface, consumption seemed like a straightforward negotiation between supply and demand; the resource-rationality of a purchase appeared self-evident. The effect of Veblen's argument was to complicate how economic decisions were defined as problems and solutions. Even if his theory was wrong in the particulars, its historical emergence is a reminder that resource-rational analysis depends on ideas (consumer preference, game theory) with their own histories.
We present these case studies not to deflate the value of resource-rational analysis but rather to enrich it. History can help capture the stranger aspects of human cognition, by drawing attention to the ways that people have come to count (or not count) certain things as problems, choices, and solutions in the first place. And if resource-rational analysis achieves wider recognition, an attention to how “problems” and “solutions” are defined could have an intriguing secondary effect. In the hands of actual people making actual decisions, it could feed into the very processes that Lieder and Griffiths document. That is, resource-rational analysis could be an engine, not a camera (MacKenzie Reference MacKenzie2006), altering how people understand the problems they face and the solutions available to them.