Is the human being a rational animal?

We have often heard that the human being is a rational animal. but is that really so? Studies surrounding a person’s daily thinking and behavior show us that this statement can be wrong, especially if we take it as absolute.

So, It is common to refer to human intellect as a differentiating factor compared to animals. Even the term rational animal is used with a connotation of superiority. However, these definitions often have interesting nuances that are worth understanding.

We are going to divide the reflection at hand into two parts to understand it better. In the first of them we are going to try to shed light on what it means to be an animal. And in the second, we will talk about people’s rationality and how they use it.

The human being as another animal

The human being is categorized as a living being within the animal kingdom. This is because fulfills the characteristics and functions of an animal (for more information you can consult this link). On the other hand, there is no shortage of works that emphasize something very common: that people are endowed with intelligence and reason. Two concepts that, in appearance, distinguish us from animals.

Intelligence in living beings

However, intelligence is still an adaptation to the environment, necessary for the survival of the species. Just as a cat or a dog survives because they have claws and teeth, human beings have intelligence as another resource to survive.

In fact, If humans had not had that flexibility and cognitive capacity, we would have possibly become extinct. (We are not the most agile or the fastest or the tallest or the shortest). There are also experts who argue that we are the most adapted species. In reality, when we talk about adaptation and natural selection, the terms more or less do not make much sense: an adapted species is a species that exists without any serious danger of extinction. Therefore, all or most of species that are not extinct, for the moment, are adapted.

The truth is Our plasticity allows us to inhabit very different areas of the earth, with very different conditions. But we are not unique in that either, many bacteria are better than us at expansion. In this sense we are just another animal, with our particular characteristics, but neither better nor worse than those of other living beings.

The rational animal

A second aspect to address, regarding the question that gives the article its title, is another question: what does rational mean within the concept of “rational animal.”

Casually, We understand rational as the ability to evaluate problems or events objectively and respond to them logically. We can also understand it as the antonym of emotional or instinctive. The biologist William E.. Ritter explains to us in his study published in the journal “Human Biology” what dIsociating emotional and rational makes no sense.

This is so because Our behavior is always influenced by both parties, and on many occasions it is impossible to separate one influence from the other. It is true that sometimes there is more involvement of emotional aspects and on other occasions we are more rational. However, we still cannot see them as two independent ways of acting: both continually influence each other.

The human being and heuristics

But let’s leave emotion aside, and talk about the extent to which our neocortex is “rational.” From the psychology of thought, a comparison of human logic with Aristotelian logic has been made.. The latter represents the purest and most mathematical reasoning possible. Scientists quickly realized that the two ways of thinking did not coincide.

Now, if human beings do not use logic when thinking, what is their way of reasoning? If we want to find an answer, let’s think that Human beings have limited cognitive resources and often need to act quickly.If we were able to be “purely logical”, we would spend an enormous amount of resources to make each decision and we would be able to issue complex responses. However, that is not the case, is it? For this reason, People reason through mental shortcuts, known in psychology as heuristics. These are reasoning based on probability and experience, direct or indirect. At the adaptation level, it is more profitable to do probable reasoning, assuming a controlled risk that it is not correct, than to end this risk and take an eternity to make decisions. .

Is the human being a rational animal?

After observing the data about human thought and behavior we can make several reflections. The statement “the human being is a rational animal” must be taken very carefully and with a certain distance. Rational or not, in principle we cannot say that this positions us better or worse compared to other living beings when we talk about adaptation.

On the other hand, Studies tell us that we are never strictly rationalIn fact, in many important decisions we are not and we act based on what our intuition or heart (our most instinctive and primitive part) tells us.

One way of calling ourselves, coined by social psychology, is “cognitively destitute.” There is a reason for this adjective: our brains are programmed to economize the resources we have as much as possible. Depending on the importance of the event or problem, it will carry out more or less elaborate reasoning, but always trying to save effort.

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