In psychological science, the assumptions underlying one's work are often more important than the work itself. For example, the voluminous experiments conducted by B. F. Skinner and many of his colleagues (see Skinner Reference Skinner1965) in the name of behaviorism make perfect sense, if one accepts that the mind is an impenetrable black box. If one does not accept this assumption, one may wonder why one would have conducted any of these experiments in the first place, or reach the conclusion that Skinner did, even to the end of his life, that we understand the mind when we understand environmental contingencies. Cognitive psychology of the kind proposed by Miller et al. (Reference Miller, Galanter and Pribram1960) and Newell and Simon (Reference Newell and Simon1972), which has largely (although not entirely) replaced behaviorism, has argued that we can indeed penetrate the black box, and that, when we do, we find that an astonishing variety of behavior can be understood in terms of the rational thoughts underlying it. Economists have long accepted this view, although Kahneman and Tversky (Reference Kahneman and Tversky1972) challenged it, only themselves to be challenged by Gigerenzer (Reference Gigerenzer2007) and others. Today, affective scientists, among others, are showing the extent to which cognition taken alone does not account for behavior we once thought was purely or even largely cognitive (see, e.g., Davidson et al. Reference Davidson, Scherer and Goldsmith2002).
The July 14, 2007, New York Times featured a story discussing mass murderers in the Muslim world and exploring how such acts could be committed by “people who have supposedly dedicated their lives to scientific rationalism and to helping others” (Fattah Reference Fattah2007). The story quotes a Jordanian researcher, Hassan Abu Hanieh, as stating that the most radical among the Muslims are those with the most scientific tendencies. Osama Bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahri (leaders of the terrorist group Al Qaeda), and George Habash (terrorist and former leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine), are given as several of a number of examples. The focus of the story is on the doctors who unsuccessfully plotted the recent London bombings and then the smashing of their car into the Glasgow Airport. One could argue, of course, that the suicide bombings and mass murder, and the imaginations used to spawn them, are rational, at least for some people, but if one argues that, what meaning is left in the term “rational”?
The story in the July 13, 2007, New York Times does not necessarily bode much better for the rational imagination hypothesis. Louisiana Senator David Vitter spoke quite rationally, he thought, in arguing for family values and a whole host of right-wing causes. It is not clear that his imagination was so rational in imagining and acting on his desires to patronize an escort service, leading him to confess to “serious sin” (Associated Press 2007). He and other “reasonable” thinkers – Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich among them – seem to have been anything but rational in their imaginings about how to satisfy their needs. Their thinking seems to have approached the kind of “miracle world” (Byrne Reference Byrne2005, p. 10) counterfactual thinking that Byrne seems to think is so rare – a miracle world in which they, as extremely public figures, can say one thing, do the opposite, and hope that no one notices the contradictions. At this point, Bush's cheery, optimistic thinking regarding the Iraq War perhaps comes even closer to miracle world thinking, as does that of the roughly 30% of the people in the United States who are satisfied with his job performance. The Bush camp once imagined that the battle would be a cakewalk and that the mission was already accomplished, but there was little rationality in their imaginings.
Note that the argument here is not about error (Byrne Reference Byrne2005, p. 17). When it comes to imagination, it is not even clear what constitutes error. Rather, it is about the kind of largely irrational imagining people do much of the time. Some of that thinking leads nowhere (e.g., “It would be nice if I were President of the United States”). Some of it leads somewhere (e.g., Munch imagining The Scream, and it is not clear what is “rational” about that painting). And some of it leads to disaster (e.g., Clinton imagining his encounter with Monica Lewinsky the day she wore the dress that later would provide DNA evidence against him).
Most of Byrne's examples throughout her book are hypothetical and, like laboratory studies, more susceptible to rational thought. When she gets into real-world examples, I believe, her notion of rational imagination breaks down. One such example is Lee Harvey Oswald's murder of John F. Kennedy. What was rational about Oswald's imagining the results? Perhaps he was deluded. But today, countless people still believe, against all evidence, that he was part of a larger plot. They might be right. But the evidence is not there. Millions of people believe that the 9/11 attacks, another real-world example used by Byrne, were a Jewish plot. Again, one cannot prove that this attack was not a Jewish (or Buddhist or Hindu) plot, but the evidence is not there. Are their imaginations rational, or in the service of what their emotions wish them to believe? In the news on July 13, 2007, Bush was reported as still drawing a link between Al Qaeda and 9/11, years after any such link was shown to be false (Gordon & Rutenberg Reference Gordon and Rutenberg2007). There is not much rationality in that imagination. Byrne's examples work better when they are hypothetical laboratory fictions than in the few cases they are drawn from the real world. Byrne's section on “Why people focus on forbidden fruit” (Byrne Reference Byrne2005, p. 87) just doesn't explain why people focus on forbidden fruit.
One even might argue that the emphasis on rationality and imagination is not only incorrect, but can be harmful in the practical domain. This is largely the argument of Westen (Reference Westen2007), whose main thesis is that the Democrats repeatedly lose U.S. and other presidential elections because they severely misunderstand the minds of the electorate. They focus on the rational aspect of the imagination, whereas in fact people's votes are controlled by their emotions, an understanding the Republicans reached long ago. Stanovich (Reference Stanovich and Sternberg2002) has even coined the term “dysrationalia” to characterize the very irrational thinking and imagining of intelligent people.
To conclude, Byrne's The Rational Imagination is a brilliant book that deserves great commendation. But its fundamental assumption regarding the rationality of imagination reflects a wishful view of cognitive psychology that people's behavior, for the most part, can be understood in rational terms. As we look at the current messes in our own country (the United States), as well as in others, we may think – if only it were so.
