Vocational psychology has a long history of acting as a lens that focuses research in basic sciences on the particular experience of work in people’s lives. This article presents several areas on the ascendancy in the broader scientific literature and ask how vocational psychology might apply them to issues of work in people’s lives. The authors’ observations tend to revolve around the growing view of humans as less rational and more intuitive than our earlier understanding. In that vein, the authors discuss (a) differences between the environment in which we evolved and the one in which we currently exist; (b) the singularity of our evolutionary impetus to survive and reproduce (that excludes our current emphasis on happiness); (c) the modular, two-system brain that includes our unconscious/intuitive system and our conscious/rational system; and (d) several recent developments in psychotherapy that recognize and respond to some of these new understandings. For simplicity sake, our questions might be subsumed under the larger question: How do we apply post-rational theory to hyperrational humans? Rejuvenation of the field might be tied to our willingness to listen to science being done around us, and not relying too heavily on the excellent work accomplished by those who came before us.
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