"The decoy effect is just one example of people being swayed by what mainstream economists have traditionally considered irrelevant noise. After all, their community has, for a century or so, taught that the value you place on a thing arises from its intrinsic properties combined with your needs and desires. It is only recently that economics has reconciled with human psychology. The result is the booming field of behavioral economics...
Yet for all their revolutionary impact, even as the behaviorists have overturned the notion that our information processing is economically rational, they still suggest that it should be economically rational. When they describe human decision-making processes that don’t conform to economic theory, they speak of “mistakes”—what Kahneman often calls “systematic errors.” Only by accepting that economic models of rationality lead to “correct” decisions, can you say that human thought-processes lead to “wrong” ones.
But what if the economists—both old-school and behavioral—are wrong? What if our illogical and economically erroneous thinking processes often lead to the best possible outcome? Perhaps our departures from economic orthodoxy are a feature, not a bug. If so, we’d need to throw out the assumption that our thinking is riddled with mistakes. The practice of sly manipulation, based on the idea that the affected party doesn’t or can’t know what’s going on, would need to be replaced with a rather different, and better, goal: self knowledge."
http://m.nautil.us/issue/21/information/yes-youre-irrational-and-yes-thats-ok
FB: "If you read research that emphasizes “mistakes,” he says, “one of the conclusions you would come to is that human beings are just stupid. As a lifelong member of the species, I have a little bit of a problem with that.”
Susceptibility to the “decoy effect” is just one of a number of “irrational” decision strategies that have stood the test of evolutionary time, which suggests these strategies have advantages."
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