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Are humans rational? To answer this question, we need to investigate two sets of issues: (1) ‘What does it mean to be rational?’, ‘What is necessary for a person to be rational?’, and ‘What is sufficient for a person to be rational?’ (the philosophical questions about rationality); and (2) ‘Do humans satisfy a sufficient condition for being rational?’, ‘Do humans fail to satisfy a necessary condition for being rational?’, and ‘What do empirical studies say about these issues?’ (the psychological questions about rationality).

We discuss the philosophical questions in this section and the psychological questions in the next section.

‘Rationality’ means different things in different contexts (Bortolotti 2014). We will focus on a narrow sense of rationality here: that is, rationality in the context of reasoning. In particular, we (tentatively) accept what Edward Stein (1996) calls ‘the standard picture of rationality’, according to which rationality consists in reasoning in accordance with the rules of logic, probability, and decision-making (see Box 1A).