The tendency to generate overly complex, reason-heavy explanations for phenomena that are better explained by simpler, emotional, social, or irrational motives. It's the bias of the intellectualizer who cannot accept that people (or systems) often act from greed, fear, prejudice, or stupidity, and instead constructs elaborate rational edifices.
*Example: Explaining a populist political uprising not through economic despair and cultural anxiety, but through a 10-point model of "rational voter choice in response to declining signal-to-noise ratios in the media ecosystem." This hyperrationalization bias imposes a grid of rationality on fundamentally non-rational behavior.*
by Dumu The Void February 9, 2026
Get the Hyperrationalization Bias mug.The fallacy that pure reason is the only valid tool to dissect any subject, including profound moral evils. It assumes one can and should debate the "logic" of racism, the "economic efficiency" of slavery, or the "rational merits" of genocide in a detached, clinical way, as if they were abstract puzzles. This bias mistakes the application of rationality for moral intelligence, and often serves to sanitize horror.
Example: A forum hosting a "rational debate" on the Holocaust where participants are instructed to "set aside emotions" and argue only from "statistical and strategic premises" about Nazi efficiency. The hyperrationalism bias creates a morally monstrous space where the form of rational discourse is used to eviscerate its ethical content.
by Dumu The Void February 9, 2026
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