Adaptive
Link to originalIt's the adults who then temper their fears of death with magic and stories
Ecological rationality
- Evolved for ancestral environments
- In context: base rate (familiar) vs probability (unfamiliar)
- Time lag: poor for novel/artificial problems like cars
The criterion by which the “correctness” of solutions is evaluated is evolutionary: The decisions made by the cognitive mechanism led, on average, to better survival and enhanced reproduction in ancestral environments relative to alternative designs that were present at the time. What matters in the eyes of selection is not truth, validity, or logical consistency but simply what works in the currency of reproductive success. Before we conclude that human cognitive mechanisms are riddled with biases and errors of judgment, we need to ask which adaptive problems human cognitive mechanisms evolved to solve and what would be “sound judgment” or “successful reasoning” from an evolutionary perspective. If humans have trouble locating their cars by color at night in parking lots illuminated with sodium vapor lamps, we would not conclude that our visual system is riddled with errors. Our eyes were designed to perceive the color of objects under natural, not artificial, light (Shepard, 1992). Many of the research programs that have documented “biases” in judgment, it turns out, have used artificial, evolutionarily unprecedented experimental stimuli that are analogous to sodium vapor lamps.
Link to original