The Rational Use of Cognitive Resources

A new approach to understanding irrational behavior and modeling human cognition

What does it mean to act rationally? Mathematicians, economists, and statisticians have argued that a rational actor chooses actions that maximize their expected utility. By this standard, people routinely behave irrationally—and psychologists have amassed long lists of cognitive biases and heuristics to explain why. This book suggests a different approach: resource-rational analysis. With finite time and brain power, it is often unrealistic to consider all the options or determine the exact expected utility of any one of them. By reframing questions of rational action in terms of how we should make the best use of our limited cognitive resources, the book offers a new take on fundamental questions at the heart of cognitive psychology, behavioral economics, and the design of artificial intelligence systems.

The book presents a formal framework for applying resource-rational analysis to understand and improve human behavior, a set of tools developed by the authors to make this easier, and examples of how they have used this approach to revisit classic questions about human cognition, pose new ones, and enhance human rationality. The book will be a valuable resource for psychologists, economists, and philosophers as well as neuroscientists studying human brains and minds and computer scientists working to reproduce such systems in machines.