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Well, Filtherton, we as human beings have no way of understanding other people except by our observations of their actions, which are naturally affected by our own interpretations. If you assume that you yourself are rational, and that the people you interact with generally are rational as well (defined in approximately the same way as you define it for yourself, or at least within some reasonable range), then your interpretation of how others are acting will be influenced by that.
As I said, this stuff can't exist in a vacuum. People act in context, and the observers observe in their own context as well.
I just think it's a huge (and hugely arrogant) step to say that people -- more specifically, other people -- act irrationally. You're imposing your own values that way, rather than granting others the respect of their own decisionmaking. Absent mental illness of some kind, in most cases you just can't make a pronouncement that others are behaving irrationally; all you can say is that they are making a judgment different from yours.
It's like buying a lottery ticket - most economists will say it's irrational to buy lottery tickets because they have only an infintessimal chance of winning. Yet millions of people buy them. Are they all nuts? No, not at all. That's because they are not buying just an infintessimal chance of winning; they are also buying that sense of possibility and anticipation, because (as the ad goes here in NY) "you have to be in it to win it." Until the bet is lost and they toss the ticket in the trash, they have an interlude of thinking there is a chance, however remote, of ending their financial worries. I bet if you asked most lottery buyers whether they expect to win, they'll say "no, probably not. But you never know, lightning can strike." Is that irrational? Not to me it isn't. Maybe a different judgment than I would make, but hardly irrational.
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