It’s not at all clear automaticity even exists in a way that improves your understanding of the world.

You can assume people do things because they’re basically rational with consideration for their values, which may be axiomatic and their information, which may be incomplete or wrong - or you can assume people have a head full of fuzz.

Or we could not assume a priori whether people are rational or irrational, and instead observe (including our own behaviors) and try to fit them what we see in an explanatory framework.

Are our purchasing decisions all rational "with consideration for our values"?

(TFA on that aspect weasely includes class signalling as a "rational" choice, even though such signalling is mediated through implicit, not rationally arrived at and analysed, influences, not to mention people performing the same choices even when their purchases are not visible to third parties anyway).

Or, do we see rational behavior on Black Friday stampedes? Are those rational actors, trying to maximize their money's worth, and are those rational purchases (even with class signalling included)? Is sleeping outside an Apple Store for the night to get the new model first when you're not doing it to resell it? Or any number of similar phenomena?

If you extend rationality to also consider that even if the rationality of a circumstance is computable, you may not personally have the computational resources to determine it (what may be rational for a human may not seem straightforward to a macaque, or a goldfish) then yes, all of these things are rational.

The problem with calling things irrational is that it doesn’t allow you to make any predictions. You’re saying “there’s no logic to this thing” which may or may not be true but it is fairly bold to look at something you don’t have an explanation for and say “that’s irrational”.

>The problem with calling things irrational is that it doesn’t allow you to make any predictions. You’re saying “there’s no logic to this thing” which may or may not be true but it is fairly bold to look at something you don’t have an explanation for and say “that’s irrational”.

That's absolutely true.

But it's not the kind of irrational that's the article tries to refute. That one comes with mechanisms and predictions, it's just not conscious (or not fully conscious) to the subject.

The kinds of non-rationality ("automaticity") discussed are e.g. as if we noticed that every time we play somber music at work, a subject gets more moody. There's a mechanism to invoke it, and we can predict the reaction of us playing it vs more energetic music, but the subject would not consciously know that it does it - and it wont be a "rational" decision they made to be more moody.

Basically, the article tries to refute the existence of a whole class of unconscious automatic responses, bring back the crude man as some fully "rational agent" that economics threw into the dustbin decades ago.

Also, I imagine you've noticed that if two people get involved in a more in-depth discussion about particulars, there's typically no common agreed upon definition (or interpretation of "facts") for the word "rational", or many other of the words we use. Yet we carry on oblivious.

Row row row your boat...