It is a viable strategy in many games to act so irrationally that other parties will go out of their way to accommodate you in a way that they would not otherwise.<p>A classic example is a game of chicken (at least, where something is on the line). Sure, it&#x27;s irrational to run into the other person; but it&#x27;s totally advantageous to convince the other party that you&#x27;re willing to do so. At a certain point there&#x27;s not much difference between a determined effort to look crazy and actual crazy behavior.<p>It gets even more interesting when the strategy is designed by a different actor or process than carries it out. For example, the people running a society might believe it to be advantageous for their group to look so defensive and prickly that no one will touch them; but in order to do so, they have to create a society that actually <i>is</i> quite irrational. Or, natural processes of evolution might favor organisms (well, genes that create organisms) that are actually quite irrational in their behavior, because that irrationality will change the behavior of other organisms.