B (2007) “Leaky” rationality: How research on behavioral decision making challenges normative standards of rationality

ABSTRACT—For more than 30 years, decision-making re-search has documented that people often violate various principles of rationality, some of which are so fundamental that theorists of rationality rarely bother to state them.We take these characteristics of decisionmaking as a given but argue that it is problematic to conclude that they typically represent departures from rationality. The very psycho-logical processes that lead to ‘‘irrational’ ’ decisions (e.g., framing, mental accounting) continue to exert their in-fluence when one experiences the results of the decisions. That is, psychological processes that affect decisions may be said also to ‘‘leak’ ’ into one’s experience. The implica-tion is that formal principles of rationality do not provide a good enough normative standard against which to assess decision making. Instead, what is needed is a substantiv