“If I were to ask people the definition of ‘sane’, most people would say it’s someone who’s cool and logical – we’re sensible when we’re capable and think in a very logical, simple, analytical way,” he says. Tessa Charlesworthassistant professor of management and organizations at Kellogg.
But when Charlesworth and co Charles Dorrison of Georgetown University studied how people actually defined rationality—based on word embeddings of a vast collection of texts on the Internet—realized that this stereotypical view of rationality only tells half the story.
On the one hand, their study of real-world text confirmed that most people associated “rational” with words like logical, analytical, and efficient. On the other hand, however, most people also associated “reasonable” with words like reasonable, ethical, responsible, and trustworthy—attributing much more warmth to the term than previously expected.
When people write about the most sane person they can think of, “they can say, ‘My friend is really sane not only because she’s sane but also because she’s really trustworthy,'” says Charlesworth. “There are two subcomponents of rationality—an analytical side and an interpersonal side—and people have often used them equally and interchangeably.”
After discovering how everyday people actually think about rationality, the authors explored stereotypes associated with the word. Across 66 social groups, they found consistently strong associations between “rational” and groups of people who had more power and status. For example, “rational” was associated with men more than women, the young more than the old, and the rich more than the poor.
Rationality is a valuable trait—one that is often seen as the very essence of humanity, according to Charlesworth. So these seemingly innocent associations can have serious implications for how people are seen and treated in society, including the kind of careers and wages people earn.
“Many other stereotypes are confirmed by the fundamental judgment of how intelligent or rational we think people are,” he says. “For example, stereotypes about which careers are ‘good’ or ‘bad’, or which occupations deserve high pay or not – these kinds of stereotypes seem to arise from the fundamental idea of who and what jobs are rational.”
840 billion words
The data Charlesworth and Dorison looked at for their study consisted of 840 billion words—considered a broadly representative sample of online text in 2014. The words were drawn from everything archived online in English, from blog posts to Google Books entries.
They then used an algorithm to condense this large language data set into word representations—maps that measure how closely a word is related to other words.
“The algorithm basically goes through all the word pairs and co-occurrences. It then uses those co-occurrences to make a map where words that are close to the map have also appeared a lot together and have higher similarities in meaning,” says Charlesworth. “‘Bread’ and ‘butter’ are very close, for example, but ‘bread’ and some other random job like ‘forest’ or ‘bicycle’ would be much further apart.”
The algorithm repeated this process over and over until it landed on the best representation or map of all word meanings.
For “rational,” the words and features that had the strongest association could be categorized into two general categories. The first included words that denoted logic, conciseness, and practicality (which the researchers referred to as “analytic rationality”). The second consisted of words characterized by reliability, trust, and understanding (or “interpersonal rationality”).
The combination of these two descriptions of the rational—the analytic and the interpersonal components—constituted most of the meaning of the word.
Stereotypical associations
In addition to defining “rational,” Charlesworth and Dorison’s analysis revealed associations between the word and more powerful groups of people, reflecting a new dimension of stereotyping that previous research had largely overlooked. They found that “rationality” was much more closely associated with historically dominant groups across the 66 sociodemographics the team looked at—including differences by gender, age, race, sexual orientation, and social class.
For example, there was a significantly stronger relationship between ‘reasonable’ and ‘rich’ than between ‘rational’ and ‘poor’. The result was the same for “rational” and “white” (vs. “black”), “men” (vs. “women”), “manager” (vs. “worker”), and “citizen” (vs. “immigrant”), among many others. This connection between logic and the dominant group was equally strong when people used either the analytic or the interpersonal meaning of the word.
“This means that, in everyday language, all of these high-power groups—rich, straight, white, etc.—appeared much more often with rationality, while their lower-power counterparts appeared much less often with rationality,” says Charlesworth.
The researchers also found that people were more “rationally” associated with certain jobs, including those that are often high-level, such as engineer, technician, developer, programmer and consultant. More rationally stereotyped occupations were also those with fewer women, more whites, and fewer blacks.
Additionally, occupations stereotyped as “rational” were the highest paying but only for men, based on wages reported by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. That is, the more a job was characterized as “rational,” the greater the pay gap between men and women.
When they dug deeper, the researchers found that most of this difference between rationality stereotypes and pay differences was due to analytical rationality. Thus, jobs that were stereotyped with the cold and calculating type of rationality had a large gender wage gap. In contrast, jobs stereotyped with the interpersonal type of rationality, which emphasizes morality, trustworthiness, or reliability, had little difference in pay.
Some of the jobs with the strongest stereotypes and the biggest gender pay gap were financial advisor, computer programmer and teacher — where the average weekly pay was about $400 to $600 higher for men than women. By comparison, some of the jobs with the weakest stereotypes and the smallest pay gap between men and women were waitress, bartender and cashier.
Coming out of the ivory tower
The group’s nuanced understanding of “rational” helps resolve a long-running debate among scholars about how best to define it.
In the field of finance, for example, the rational decision maker is usually seen as a cold and calculating individual who maximizes self-interest. But others in psychology prefer to see rationality as fundamentally related to cooperation with others. The current study circumvents such arguments by teasing out how people use the word in the everyday world.
“There’s a huge utility in getting out of our ivory tower and thinking about how these concepts are actually used and based on how people actually talk,” says Charlesworth. “Actually, in doing this, we discovered that, in a way, both sides were right; the average person uses both kinds of definitions interchangeably and frequently.”
Collectively, the findings offer other important lessons for organizations and workers as well.
When companies discuss their values or the type of employees to hire, the concept of rationality and rationality is bound to come up. It is vital in these times for leaders to recognize that being logical is more than just being logical and analytical. it’s also about being conscientious and trustworthy, says Charlesworth.
“If you’re in a company or a profession, think about how you value both attributes of rationality,” he adds. “And consider how you can also strengthen the interpersonal dimensions of rationality, given that they appear to be associated with jobs that have lower gender and pay gaps and greater representation of women.”
Employees and job seekers can also benefit from understanding the full scope of what it means to be reasonable. Leaning on both the logical, analytical side and the reliable, interpersonal side of being logical can open the door to more opportunities.
“The two different definitions of the rational have different roles to play in society, but we see that both can be valued, and both are important,” says Charlesworth. “So it’s important to think about how to make sure we frame ourselves, our roles and our companies both ways.”
