About
About the journal
The Unreasonable Human is an independent journal about how people actually think, decide and live. It is written and edited by one person, Alina Petrova.
Alina Petrova
Editor-in-chief
Alina Petrova is a Year 12 student preparing to apply to university, and the founder and editor of The Unreasonable Human. She reads across psychology, economics, behavioural science and neuroscience, and writes about the gap between how people are supposed to decide and how they actually do.
Why this journal exists
I started The Unreasonable Human in Year 12, when the reading I was doing for my university applications kept circling the same puzzle. Economics describes a person who weighs every option, never tires and never regrets a choice. Psychology and neuroscience describe the person I actually meet, in the corridor and in the mirror: someone who follows defaults, puts things off, pays to avoid small losses and gives more than any model says she should.
Those habits are usually filed as mistakes. I think they are better read as evidence of how minds work, and this journal is where I follow that evidence across psychology, economics, behavioural science and neuroscience: written plainly, with the numbers shown and the sources named. It is independent: what it covers and what it concludes are my decisions alone.
I am a student, not a professor, and I write like one: to understand something properly rather than to sound certain. The aim is not to scold anyone into being rational but to understand people as they are, as a first step towards deciding a little better. I would rather publish one careful piece than five quick ones, and I would rather be corrected than stay comfortably wrong.
Everything here is written to be read slowly. Every piece is mine, and so is every error. If you find one, tell me.
What the journal publishes
- Essays
- Long reads on how we actually think, decide and live.
- Data stories
- Original analysis, told plainly and shown honestly.
- Series
- Multi-part essays, read in order.
- Podcast
- Long conversations with people who study people.
- Book reviews
- What to read, what to skip, and why.
How to read
- The Tuesday letter
- One email a week with the latest essays, a data story and a few ideas worth arguing about. No spam, and you can leave whenever you like.
- The podcast
- The rational animal. Long conversations with people who study people. New episodes every other Saturday.
- RSS
- Every new essay, data story, review and episode is in the site feed; the podcast has its own feed for your podcast app.
Contact
Letters, corrections and suggestions for what I should look at next are welcome at hello@theunreasonablehuman.com.
The journal has one writer, so it does not take pitches.