Recovered from the original publisher: Kellogg Insight
“If I were to ask people for the definition of ‘rational,’ most might say it’s someone cold and calculating—we’re rational when we are competent and think in a very logical, straightforward, analytical way,” says Tessa Charlesworth, an assistant professor of management and organizations at Kellogg.
But when Charlesworth and colleague Charles Dorison of Georgetown University studied how people actually defined rationality—based on word embeddings of a massive collection of internet text—they realized that this stereotypical view of rationality only tells half of the story.
On the one hand, their study of real-world text confirmed that most people did associate “rational” with words like logical, analytical, and efficient. On the other hand, however, most people also associated “rational” with words like reasonable, ethical, responsible, and trustworthy—attributing much more warmth to the term than previously expected.
When people write about the most rational person they can think of, “they might say, ‘My friend is really rational not only because she’s logical but also because she’s really dependable,’” Charlesworth says. “There are two subcomponents of rationality—an analytical side and an interpersonal side—and people often used them equally and interchangeably.”
After figuring out how everyday people really think about rationality, the authors explored stereotypes linked to the word. Across 66 social groups, they consistently found strong associations between “rational” and groups of people that had more power and status. For example, “rational” was associated with men more than women, with young people more than old people, and with the rich more than the poor.
Rationality is a prized trait—one that is often seen as the very essence of humanity, according to Charlesworth. So these seemingly innocent associations can have serious implications on the way that people are seen and treated in society, including what kind of careers and salaries people get.
“A lot of other stereotypes are underwritten by the fundamental judgment of how intelligent or rational we think people are,” she says. “For example, stereotypes about which careers are ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ or which occupations deserve to be highly paid or not—these kinds of stereotypes seem to arise from the foundational idea of who, and what jobs, are rational.”