Barrett,H.C.
Fiddick,L.

Does the human mind possess domain-specific inference mechanisms for solving the sorts of problems that confronted our distant ancestors? In a recent paper, C. Rode et al (1999) argue that human decision-making was shaped by an evolutionary history of foraging to include procedures for reasoning adaptively about risk. Rode et al's study is an important step forward in the debate over human decision-making, in two ways. First, it shows that the ambiguity effect is not merely a systematic reasoning error, as had been previously assumed. People interpret ambiguous options as having high outcome variance, and can be induced to favor these options when doing so increases the probability of satisfying a need or goal. This tendency is indeed systematic, but it is adaptive rather than erroneous. Second, Rode et al's study might help to clarify what we should seek in theories of human decision-making. Rode et al's work is a valuable step away from the mere cataloging of adherences to, and departures from, objective norms, and towards a cataloging of mechanisms designed by the causal, historical process of evolution. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved)

Barrett, H. C., & Fiddick, L. (2000). Evolution and risky decisions. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4, 251-254. (Full text)

Publication year	2000
Document type:	Article
Publication status:	Published
External URL:	http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/anthro/faculty/barrett/risky.pdf View
Categories:	Probability
Keywords: