Embodied Rationality is a research program developed by the Italian behavioral economists Antonio Mastrogiorgio and Enrico Petracca.

The program starts from considering that current research on human rationality is still fundamentally embedded in the ‘cognitivist’ paradigm of early cognitive psychology, as it recognizes cognition as internal symbolic manipulation of the external world. This framework basically neglects the last two decades of advancements in cognitive psychology that have synthetically been grouped under the label embodied cognition. The notion of embodied cognition, directly challenging the cognitivist stance, posits that cognitive processes:

• fundamentally rely on action and interaction with the world;
• constitutively depend on the sensory-motor system;
• work through some form of externalism, i.e. use the external world as a resource for cognitive processes.

Building upon (but also going a step further with respect to) Simon’s bounded rationality and Gigerenzer’s ecological rationality, the general hypothesis of Embodied Rationality relies on the fact that the human body is the pivotal entity in the 'coupling' between reasoning processes and environmental demands.

*not in Plato's interpretation