Rational Bias

The cognitive distortion where one's own reasoning is perceived as perfectly objective, simply because it follows internal logical rules, while ignoring that the starting premises, value judgments, and framing of the problem are themselves subjective, emotional, or culturally loaded. It's the bias of believing you're bias-free because you feel coldly logical.

Example: A CEO making a "rational" decision to offshore jobs after a dispassionate cost-benefit analysis. Their rational bias allows them to ignore the premises they accepted without question: that shareholder value is the supreme metric, and that community destruction is an external "cost" not factored in.

Rational Bias by Dumu The Void February 9, 2026

Rational Biases

Systematic distortions that arise from the way rationality is defined, valued, and deployed in different contexts. Rational Biases include: assuming that rationality is universal rather than culturally specific; treating emotional responses as inherently irrational; privileging instrumental reason (means-end calculation) over other forms of reason; assuming that rational actors exist in economic theory; using "rational" as a term of approval rather than a description. Rational Biases shape not just how we think but how we judge thinking—in ourselves and others.

Rational Biases "She called his response 'emotional' and therefore irrational. That's Rational Bias—assuming emotion and reason are opposites. But emotions can be rational responses to situations; reason without emotion is calculation without wisdom. Rational biases make us miss the rationality in feeling and the feeling in rationality."

Rational Biases by Dumu The Void March 1, 2026