It's even worse - the more we believe ourselves to be rational, the bigger blind spot we have for our own rationalizing behavior. The best way to increase rationality is to believe oneself to be rationalizing!

It's one of the reasons I don't trust bayesians who present posteriors and omit priors. The cargo cult rigor blinds them to their own rationalization in the highest degree.

Yeah, rationality is a bug of our brain, not a feature. Our brain just grew so much that now we can even use it to evaluate maths and logical expressions. But it's not its primary mode of operation.

Any links to the research on this?