In life, we will come across behavior by others that appear to us to be certainly irrational, but the thing about making a judgment like that is the salient fact, that what appears irrational to us, may not appear irrational to the person so making that decision, and further to the point, that often we do not ourselves have all the information to be able to know for a certainty how irrational a decision may or may not have been. That is to say, the information that we have as compared to what the subject person has, can be not only dynamically different but may indeed conflict with one another, therefore their act is going to appear irrational to us because the information that they are acting upon is not the same information that we so have. Additionally, two people can have the same information but come to differing conclusions because their interpretation of that information is not the same. This is why we have those cases in which we believe that we have instructed our underling with what they so need to accomplish a given task, only to find out, that their interpretation of such, has come from a different place than what we so anticipated, which we did not even consider as being a reasonable possibility to begin with and why consequently we don’t get the result that we expected.
As much as people would like to think that we are at least, occasionally, irrational, the bottom line is that most people intuitively are quite rational, it is rather our perception that makes them seem to be irrational. After all, it’s difficult to truly know what another person is thinking, or the reasoning behind such, if we aren’t that very person, because each of us has not only had different life experiences, but we also process information differently, as well. That is why, things that look positively stupid to us, that other people fall into which makes them appear to be utter fools, are probably that which on a certain level, is rational to the person so performing that act.
So then, when it comes to people inexplicably performing irrational acts, we often need to examine what is so occurring in more detail, to understand their reasoning process, or lack, thereof – as opposed to simplistically believing that they are irrational. To a very large extent, people are trying to make good decisions in their day-to-day activities, because they believe that by doing so, the results will be better for them, so whenever we see people making what appears to be a bad decision, it could well be that the information that they are dealing with, in conjunction with their life experiences or inexperience, is placing themselves into the position of which they appear to be irrational, but aren’t themselves aware of such. This is why, whenever we see irrational behavior, we need to understand what is going on so that we can then correctly weigh in as to whether or not, it is as irrational as our first impression tells us.