Thread by @Usherwood

As we all hang on every word of today's Commons debate, some thoughts on why people don't always act rationally:

1/

As a first cut, an assumption of rational behaviour isn't all bad: you might expect most people most of the time to act in a way that maximises benefit and minimises cost

2/

But already in that you can see that it's not always simple and clear-cut: seeking benefits isn't the same as avoiding costs, even before we get into what each of those thingas might be

3/

That said, it's helpful to think a bit about the internal and external factors that might shape individual's actions to produce 'irrational' outcomes

4/

Within a person, there is a very basic issue of how they understand and engage with the world around them: "if all you have is a hammer..." etc

Both what you perceive and what you value will be a big driver of how you act

5/

Importantly, this does not have a 'right' answer: there is no one correct way of looking at things, especially when you factor in personal experience, levels of knowledge and all the other things going on around you

6/

And this feeds into an individual's external environment.

No one has unlimited freedom to act as they choose, if only because there are other people out there too

7/

This particularly matters in politics, which is by definition a collective activity: there is always a conditionality that rests on others' shoulders

8/

Thus there might be legal constraints, resource constraints, constituency and group constraints, all limiting or redirecting activity

9/

To put this in context, when we look at 'Parliament', we're looking at the emergent properties of 650 MPs, interacting not only on this issue, but across a range of questions, incentives and constraints piling in from all angles

10/

Thus when we see 'irrational' behaviour we can't simply dismiss it, but instead we have to understand what has driven it and quite how it has come into conflict with the thing that we hold to be self-evident

11/

Put differently, MPs are thoughtful people trying to do right by it all (as are we all), but that doesn't mean that collective outcomes can fail to emerge or to satisfy all needs

12/

All politics is contingent and conditional for precisely that reason.

That's not to excuse it, but to suggest that we need to offer something more than snorts of disgust, not least because such matters affect us all

13/

Any way, you know all this, so back to that debate

/end