An argument for an analogical perspective on rationality & decision-making

Abstract

Humans are without any doubts the prototypical example of agents that can hold rational beliefs and can show rational behaviour. When modeling human decision-making, it seems reasonable to take the remarkable abilities of humans into account with respect to rational behaviour, but also the apparent deficiencies of humans shining up in certain rationality tasks. Based on well-known challenges for human rationality, together with results from psychological studies on decision-making and from the field of computational modeling of analogy making, we argue that analysis and modeling of rational belief and behaviour should also consider cognitive mechanisms like analogy-making and coherence maximization of the background theory.