What do you mean "I'm quasi-rational?"

"Sooo," the left gentleman with the black glasses and the sleek, tailored suit begins another question, "after you've told us how you successfully managed a business unit for two years (you nod assent), and you accomplished the turn-around at your former employer (again, hastily nodding assent), and you single-handedly raised the funding for a future fortune 500 company ("journalists", you hear yourself say fighting to restrain your beam), please tell us a bit about what you are actually not so good at." A wet thud and the room's air suddenly turned into gelatin muffling anything rudimentary reminding of a noise. Your grip at the knot of your tie misses its destination and you feel the first beads of sweat trickling down your forehead. This would be the perfect time for a cricket to come out of the hideout and hit the legs, but the pedantically cleaned offices on floor 75 in Chicago's Willis Tower are hostile habitats to insects. You try to make sense of the pandemonium in your head but after a while that feels like an hour you come to terms with the stinging fact: you have no clue about your weaknesses.

Source: sxc.hu

I guess everyone asked this question for the first time in a job interview had a moment of vision, or rather the lack of it. It's great to know your strengths but you better make sure to know your weaknesses, too. The reason is quite clear: if you don't know your foibles, but someone else does, you needlessly hand over power to that certain someone. Even messier: you don't realize it and maybe never will. But if you explore and know your weaknesses, you can steal that someone's thunder by openly acknowledging them. You can turn this into an advantage by selling it as an asset to know where your limits are. Interestingly, there appears to be increasing evidence that we, as 'the people in general', show traits that can easily be construed as weaknesses. The days are numbered for homo economicus and the idea that we all maximize "utility" in a logical, consistent, and rational way. Next time you're asked about what your weaknesses are you simply state "I'm quasi-rational." You can explain this condition by going through some of the following realities:

1.  We are disproportionately affected by a fear of regret. For instance, when you ask friends to swap lottery tickets with you, he or she will struggle to comply thinking of how awful the moment would be if their original numbers came up. The odds are actually the same for both  coupons but the thinking about the outcome can nudge our decision-making towards keeping the ticket.

2. We are vulnerable to cognitive-dissonance. Meaning, we deny new information when there are evidently new facts. When you just bought a car, chances are very high that you "overlook" a new test claiming it is rubbish. We rather read tests acknowledging our decision-making than reading the new information. Unless, of course the car turns out to be really crap, then we want our new opinion to be verified by others.

3. We are susceptible to anchoring. When we explore a new area, for instance when buying something for the first time, we set ourselves "anchors" to navigate from. No problem with that, but we often neglect to change this "anchor" when we explored the field and thus gathered new information. This isn't a big problem when you buy your first tomato, but it gets an issue when buying a more complex thing such as a car or even a company. Supermarkets take advantage of this in their vine aisles. Confronted with three bottles of Spumante, one at 1.99, another at 4.99, and the last at 9.99, we conclude that a fiver is the price to go for a medium-quality wine. Yet this is only the "suggestion" by the supermarket, not a fact.

4. We have a status-quo bias. Facing a decision with many options, we log-in the one most promising to keep us at the same level as before. A good example for this behavior is the rise of the default option in payment schemes for insurances - some insurers could actually increase sales just by offering it.

Do you see grey areas? There are none.

5. We are heuristic. This is due to our brain's gift to use experience-based short-cuts. Not an issue per se, but we tend to think learning through experience is always right. When we go on a seven-day vacation to Spain ending up with rainy weather we tend to think about Spain as a rainy place and forget the big picture. Another fine example is moms calling after their sons about not to forget their wallet, even if these sons just turned 40 and the incidence from preschool is long since past.

6. We are prone to magical-thinking. Illusionists capitalize on that, so do fund managers that had a lucky strike. We rather opt for skill than for dumb luck of an investor, who just made a million. But a reputation of Gladstone Gander or Don Juan de Marco can be quickly ruined if it isn't substantially supported by appropriate ability.

7. We have a hindsight bias. As in "Hindsight is always 20:20" we overestimate our predictive capability for events. Douglas Adams described this very fitting: "The cry 'I could have thought of that' is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that they didn't, and a very significant and revealing fact it is too."

8. We are emotional. Well, we wouldn't be humans without this characteristic right? But emotions can meddle with our decisions quite severely. Think of the home owner in love with an old hut and selling it with an accordingly exaggerated price tag. A bidder offering him the real value of the hut might even infuriate him. To quench his thirst for revenge, he could literally kick him out of his house and then might immediately start to cry because of the missed opportunity. Sort of a basket case my landlord but you get the picture.

9. We like to achieve a target  even if it is inappropriate. Young taxi drivers in New York tend to set themselves an income target for a day. So, on slow days they tend to work longer and on busy ones shorter. But as failing the target feels like a loss they stick to their system. For effectiveness they rather should "make hay" on busy days and quit early on slow ones. Gaining experience over the years the drivers apparently do just that.

10. We tend to compartmentalize. This is my favorites trait and I'm not sure if it's because I had revealing moments myself, or if it's just the spectacular examples I can choose from. When someone compartmentalizes, he or she mentally separate "decision-making-boxes" in their thinking and ignore any connections between them. It's a bit like a split personality but much more subtle. Examples begin with the smoking father telling his son not to smoke, over the "frugal manager of the year" driving a V12 BMW 7er series to work, and they reach their peak in politicians, who pretend to be family-caring husbands but send their photographed genitals around via Twitter. Did I hear someone saying double-standards?

Now, unfortunately this collection is not exhaustive and probably never will be. Yet it clearly shows that, depending on the light, we appear to behave like a bunch of idiots. On the other hand, we're not purely irrational either because we do make proper decisions, too. I suppose it's like Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist, said: "as a first approximation, it makes sense to assume rational behavior." Keep this "quasi-rationality" in mind next time you shop. Ah, and please make sure to take a photo of the recruiter to whom you've answered "One of my weaknesses is that I'm quasi rational" to and send it to me please. :-) 

C.p.: Ariely Dan, "The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home" 2010, Harper; Gee Christopher, "An Axiomatic Theory of Regret Aversion" 2010, Camebridge; Samuelson & Zeckhauser, "Status-quo bias in Decision Making" 1988, Journal of Risk and Uncertainty; Camerer Colin, "Prospect Theory in the Wild" 1998, California Institute of Technology; "Rethinking thinking", Dec 1999, The Economist; "The Difference Engine: The answering machine", Feb 2010, ibidem; "Persuasion", May 2002, ibidem; "The Weiner War", June 2012, ibidem. .