Controlled Irrationality Index (CII): Rationality as an Activation Event

This paper reconceptualizes rationality as an activation event rather than a continuous cognitive state. Most human behavior unfolds automatically through affect-guided and habitual routines; deliberation appears only when these routines are interrupted and reorganized. Building on the Controlled Irrationality (CI) framework, we introduce the Controlled Irrationality Index (CII), a metric that captures the frequency and reliability of such activation events within behavioral data—observable as pause-and-revision cycles in collaborative environments like Wikipedia and GitHub. The index formalizes rational control as a measurable reconfiguration of internal resources under situational conflict. Extending the same activation logic to large language models, the paper demonstrates that rationality emerges whenever systems—human or artificial—interrupt their default operations to restore coherence. In doing so, it completes the theoretical arc from bounded to controlled to activated rationality: from rationality as a limit, to rationality as control, to rationality as enactment.