May I humbly suggest that "become a rationalist" be replaced with "study rationality" or "improve their rationality", as appropriate (and "higher level" with whatever it means), and "rationalists [that empirically seem . . .]" with whatever group you actually observed?
(As you can tell, I've taken up the word "rationalist" as a pet peeve. I hope I'm not being more annoying than useful by repeatedly trying to dissolve the word.)
Replaced the first, fair point.
The group I observed was LWers who self-identify as rationalists.
I don't think that dissolving the word is particularly helpful in this case though. I rearranged a few parts in order to avoid a (fairly common, fairly justified) peeve, and not doing that much more to elucidate what I mean by it, compared to the similar comment with a similar question w/r/t what a better rationalist means.
On the other hand, I'm somewhat irked with the lack of information on what seems to me to be a non-wrong question.
These two questions seem to be somewhat interesting, especially for those interested in rationality outreach.
What makes someone more likely to study rationality?
More likely to become a higher level rationalist?
A few thoughts:
Empirically, rationalists seem to be more into technical fields than average, and more interested in an explicit understanding of social things than most technical people.
People who can more clearly see deficiencies in themselves, and who try to solve problems seem more likely to become rationalists, when exposed to rationality.
People who are motivated to pursue rationality for instrumental goals, rather than for funsies, seem to become better rationalists.