Your opinion is close to the truth. But in a psychology there is an alternative viewpoint. It is the concept of rationality is a wrong and oversimplified, not t

Your opinion is close to the truth. But in a psychology there is an alternative viewpoint. It is the concept of rationality is a wrong and oversimplified, not the human mind. If we see some behaviour as irrational, it means that we do not understand why it is good to behave this way. It works for perception research: when science needs to explain an illusion and why people are subjects for it, to be able to explain why people see or hear "wrong" things, or why this "wrong" things are not wrong at all, is a good science. Often times science use a very artificial setup for an experiment, the very setup is tuned so that people start to make mistakes. Take Ames Room as an example[1], it is artificially created environment when participant have not enough information to be sure, and his mind make a mistake. But mistake of the mind is a great achievement, if you try to do better with an AI, I suspect you'll end with the same result. Mind take into a consideration a lot of details, for Ames Room to work reliably, experimenter needs to draw skewed windows on the back wall, that would look as rectangles after projection. So the setup is highly unlikely a priori and mind makes a good bayesian decision that the most probable explanation is two people of different sizes. For cognitive biases we also need to be wary, because the process of creating the right experimental setup could include a lot of tweaks to make people's decision process "to fail". Scientist needs an effect that could be shown with a statistics, so he/she tweaks setup until it works. It leads to a conclusion, that if cognitive bias lacks explanation why it is a rational thing, we cannot say that this bias is a "disease/ailment". [1] https://psychology.wikia.org/wiki/Ames_room https://psychology.wikia.org/wiki/Ames_room