A casual look at the literature in social cognition reveals a vast collection of biases, errors, violations of rational choice, and failures to maximize utility. One is tempted to draw the conclusion that the human mind is woefully muddled. We present a three-category evolutionary taxonomy of evidence of biases: biases are (a) heuristics, (b) error management effects, or (c) experimental artifacts. We conclude that much of the research on cognitive biases can be profitably reframed and understood in evolutionary terms. An adaptationist perspective suggests that the mind is remarkably well designed for important problems of survival and reproduction, and not fundamentally irrational. Our analysis is not an apologia intended to place the rational mind on a pedestal for admiration. Rather, it promises practical outcomes including a clearer view of the architecture of systems for judgment and decision making, and exposure of clashes between adaptations designed for the ancestral past and the demands of the present. By casually browsing journals in the social sciences one can discover a collection

status regulates risky decision making about resources in men:

Towards a neurocognitive model of turn taking in multimodal dialog

Abstract—In two studies we tested the hypothesis that the appropriate linguistic formulation of a deontic rule – i.e. the formulation which clarifies the monadic nature of deontic operators- should produce more correct responses than the conditional formulation in Wason selection task. We tested this assumption by presenting a prescription rule and a prohibition rule in conditional vs. proper deontic formulation. We contrasted this hypothesis with two other hypotheses derived from social contract theory and relevance theory. According to the first theory, a deontic rule expressed in terms of cost-benefit should elicit a cheater detection module, sensible to mental states attributions and thus able to discriminate intentional rule violations from accidental rule violations. We tested this prevision by distinguishing the two types of violations. According to relevance theory, performance in selection task should improve by increasing cognitive effect and decreasing cognitive effort. We tested this prevision by focusing experimental instructions on the rule vs. the action covered by the rule. In study 1, in which 480 undergraduates participated, we tested these predictions through a 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 (type of the rule x rule formulation x type of violation x experimental instructions) between-subjects design. In study 2 – carried out by means of a 2 x 2 (rule formulation x type of violation) between-subjects design-we retested the hypothesis of rule formulation vs. the cheaterdetection hypothesis through a new version of selection task in which intentional vs. accidental rule violations were better discriminated. 240 undergraduates participated in this study. Results corroborate our hypothesis and challenge the contrasting assumptions. However, they show that the conditional formulation of deontic rules produces a lower performance than what is reported in literature. Keywords—Deontic reasoning; Evolutionary, linguistic, logical, pragmatic factors; Wason selection task

The modern world, with its vast nation states peopled with millions of strangers, has little in common with the social world in which humans evolved—a world of tiny bands peopled with a few dozen friends, relatives, and competitors. To negotiate that intimate social world, evolution equipped our minds with moral heuristics: decision rules that generate intuitions about fairness and justice, punitiveness and approval, right and wrong. Each was designed by natural selection to operate in a different type of ancestral social situation, and each is triggered by cues that, in an ancestral past, indicated that type of situation was occurring. Political debate in the present is often a struggle over how to characterize events in terms of these ancestral situation-types, because alternative framings trigger different evolved moral heuristics. Once triggered, a moral heuristic produces intuitions about what course of action would be virtuous or immoral, as well as intuitions about the likely consequences of taking that course of action. These intuitions motivate lawmakers and citizens to enact laws promoting or even mandating certain courses of action. But the mismatch between

iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS No need to be mushy; after all, this is only a dissertation. The contributions of others to the graduate career which has culminated in the completion of this document are many and have taken numerous forms, from friendships that will always be cherished to brief conversations that provoked a cascade of enjoyable thought. Instead of being maudlin about it, let me be abecedarian. Forthwith, the support of the following people during my studies at

relevance-guided comprehension processes tend to determine participants ’ performance and pre-empt the use of other inferential capacities. Because of this, the value of the selection task as a tool for studying human inference has been grossly overestimated. Fiddick, Cosmides, and Tooby (2000) argued against Sperber et al. that specialized inferential mechanisms, in particular the “social contract algorithm ” hypothesized by Cosmides (1989), pre-empt more general comprehension abilities, making the selection task a useful tool after all. We rebut this argument. We argue and illustrate with two new experiments, that Fiddick et al. mix the true Wason selection task with a trivially simple categorization task superficially similar to the Wason task, yielding methodologically flawed evidence. We conclude that the extensive use of various kinds of selection tasks in the psychology of reasoning has been quite counterproductive and should be discontinued.

A general theory is testable not directly but through consequences it implies when it is taken together with auxiliary hypotheses. The test can be weaker or stronger depending, in particular, on the extent to which the consequences tested are specifically entailed by the theory (as opposed to being mostly entailed by the auxiliary hypotheses

Recursive reasoning of the form what do I think that you think that I think (and so on) arises often while acting rationally in multiagent settings. Previous investigations indicate that humans do not tend to ascribe recursive thinking to others. Several multiagent decisionmaking frameworks such as RMM, I-POMDP and the theory of mind model recursive reasoning as integral to an agent’s rational choice. Real-world application settings for multiagent decision making tend to be mixed involving humans and human-controlled agents. We investigate recursive reasoning exhibited by humans during strategic decision making. In a large experiment involving 162 participants, we studied the level of recursive reasoning generally displayed by humans while playing a sequential fixedsum, two-player game. Our results show that subjects experiencing a strategic game made more competitive with fixed-sum payoffs and tangible incentives predominantly attributed first-level recursive thinking to opponents. They acted using second level of reasoning exceeding levels of reasoning observed previously.

For collective action to evolve and be maintained by selection, the mind must be equipped with mechanisms designed to identify free riders—individuals who do not contribute to a collective project but still benefit from it. Once identified, free riders must be either punished or excluded from future collective actions. But what criteria does the mind use to categorize someone as a free rider? An evolutionary analysis suggests that failure to contribute is not sufficient. Failure to contribute can occur by intention or accident, but the adaptive threat is posed by those who are motivated to benefit themselves at the expense of cooperators. In 6 experiments, we show that only individuals with exploitive intentions were categorized as free riders, even when holding their actual level of contribution constant (Studies 1 and 2). In contrast to an evolutionary model, rational choice and reinforcement theory suggest that different contribution levels (leading to different payoffs for their cooperative partners) should be key. When intentions were held constant, however, differences in contribution level were not used to categorize individuals as free riders, although some categorization occurred along a competence dimension (Study 3). Free rider categorization was not due to general tendencies to categorize (Study 4) or to mechanisms that track a broader class of intentional moral violations (Studies 5A and 5B). The results reveal the operation of an evolved concept with features tailored for solving the collective action problems faced