I observed on many occasions that it is easy to make the "right' choice when you value the fact that you are trying to live your life in the right manner. The nice feels that you get when making the right choice compensate for the willpower expended in taking the corresponding actions.
Except that most people think they are habitually in the right, and that they are consistently making the right choices. If things don't work out, often it's either attributed to some evil circumstance, or to one big choice that was bad (yet probably because they were "too trusting", turning even the bad choice into a virtue. All/most other choices were right, of course). Compounded by incompetence.
On the contrary, it's the intricacies of rationality that open our eyes to how wrong our actions often turn out to be, or rather how woefully incomplete our information is, how inadequate our future-extrapolators. It's not even that we can say "given everything we knew, at the time it was the right choice". Not while learning about cognitive biases, even the most basic ones.
If you wanna have "the nice feel" that you're consistently making the right choice, don't study rationality.
Except that most people think they are habitually in the right, and that they are consistently making the right choices. If things don't work out, often it's either attributed to some evil circumstance, or to one big choice that was bad (yet probably because they were "too trusting", turning even the bad choice into a virtue. All/most other choices were right, of course). Compounded by incompetence.
You have here a very specific model of a failure mode a person can have with many details. Be more careful with claims about "most people".
I read an interesting article today: ["Your app makes me fat"](http://seriouspony.com/blog/2013/7/24/your-app-makes-me-fat). Key quote:
"Researchers were astonished by a pile of experiments that led to one bizzare conclusion: Willpower and cognitive processing draw from the same pool of resources."
Now, when we tell people to behave rationally, we often tend to ask them to consider short term sacrifices for long term gains and act to maximise the overall "utility"; to run through a process of evaluation and taking action that uses up both cognitive processing and willpower at once.
I observed on many occasions that it is easy to make the "right' choice when you value the fact that you are trying to live your life in the right manner. The nice feels that you get when making the right choice compensate for the willpower expended in taking the corresponding actions.
And perhaps this is the value of "rationality" as a value.