La forma del pensiero. La critica alla razionalità neoclassica e la dimensione estetica dei processi decisionali

In the last decades, the neoclassical theory of homo oeconomicus’s perfect rationality has been notoriously put into question by experimental researches which eventually induced a paradigm change in favor of a more descriptive approach of economic behavior, rejecting a traditional normative stance. These researches have offered a broad set of observations around the cogni-tive, affective and perceptive mechanisms of human reasoning and judgment, particularly in the domain of economic decision making. In this essay, we want to show how so-called “heuristics” of thought, mental models and scenarios that guide human decisions and that have been studied in the cognitive sciences are partly shaped by aesthetic processes like, for ex-ample, principles of “good form” in the construction of mental schemes, for-mal and perceptual salience in reasoning, intensity of imagined scenarios, emotional involvement of narrative schemes that guide thought processes and decision-making. In sum, this paradigmatic turn not only brings economic and aesthetic behavior closer to each other, but also reveals how aesthetic principles affect thought processes themselves.