Tethered rationality is a concept introduced by Vinod Goel in Reason and Less: Pursuing Food, Sex, and Politics (MIT Press, 2022). The tethered mind model begins with the simple, commonsense idea that while we are cognitive/reasoning creatures, the cognitive/reasoning mind is built on top of and integrated into evolutionarily older systems such as the autonomic, instinctive, and associative systems. It can modulate these lower-level systems but is also in turn modulated by them. Human behavior is a blended response of the outputs of the autonomic, instinctive, associative, and reasoning systems in any given situation. The reasoning system has an input into the response, but so do the other systems.

Such a model raises two challenges: (1) how do these various systems communicate and interact, and (2) what is the control structure? These questions are discussed and answered in some detail in Goel (2022). Briefly, it is proposed that (causally efficacious) feelings of pleasure and displeasure are associated with each system, and they provide a common communication language. For example, unpleasant hunger pangs are generated by the autonomic system to trigger food-foraging/eating behavior. Intense pleasure associated with sexual arousal leads to the search for a mate with the aim of copulation. Parental instincts generate pain/distress when our children suffer and lead us to help them at all costs. The pleasure of reward and the pain of punishment are instrumental for reinforcing associations. More controversially, it is argued that even coherence relations are associated with pleasurable feelings of rightness, because they are fitness enhancing, while incoherence/inconsistency is associated with unpleasant feelings because it is harmful (Goel, 2022).

The second issue is the control structure. Who is in charge of the tethered mind? All or several systems may be triggered in any particular situation. In some cases, the same action may be initiated by multiple systems, while in other cases, different, even contradictory actions may be triggered. This is indicated by the size and direction of the light gray arrows (Figure 1). The strength of activation of any particular system is determined by the level of arousal and indicated by the size/volume of the light gray arrows. Either way, the overall response is determined by combining the sensory feelings generated by individual systems, guided by the principle of maximizing overall pleasure and minimizing displeasure. There is no central executive or the Libertarian “unmoved mover” in charge of the tethered mind. This model is motivated and described in some detail in Goel (2022).

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