Evolution And The Mechanisms Of Decision Making

Evolution and the Mechanisms of Decision Making

By PETER HAMMERSTEIN (Editor) , JEFFREY R. STEVENS (Editor)

ISBN 9780262018081

Pages 448

Year 2012

Edition 1

Publisher MIT PRESS

Subject PSYCHOLOGY

~~₹ 10800.00~~ ₹ 4320.00

Description

How do we make decisions? Conventional decision theory tells us only which behavioral choices we ought to make if we follow certain axioms. In real life, however, our choices are governed by cognitive mechanisms shaped over evolutionary time through the process of natural selection. Evolution has created strong biases in how and when we process information, and it is these evolved cognitive building blocks—from signal detection and memory to individual and social learning—that provide the foundation for our choices. An evolutionary perspective thus sheds necessary light on the nature of how we and other animals make decisions.

This volume—with contributors from a broad range of disciplines, including evolutionary biology, psychology, economics, anthropology, neuroscience, and computer science—offers a multidisciplinary examination of what evolution can tell us about our and other animals' mechanisms of decision making. Human children, for example, differ from chimpanzees in their tendency to over-imitate others and copy obviously useless actions; this divergence from our primate relatives sets up imitation as one of the important mechanisms underlying human decision making. The volume also considers why and when decision mechanisms are robust, why they vary across individuals and situations, and how social life affects our decisions.

About Author(s)

Peter Hammerstein is Professor in Organismic Evolution at the Institute for Theoretical Biology at Humboldt University, Berlin and an external member of the interdisciplinary Santa Fe Institute.Jeffrey R. Stevens is Assistant Professor of Psychology and a faculty member of the Center for Brain, Biology, and Behavior at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

Content

The Ernst Strungmann Forum
List of Contributors
1 Six Reasons for Invoking Evolution in Decision Theory
Biological and Cognitive Prerequisites
2 Putting Mechanisms into Behavioral Ecology
3 Machinery of Cognition
4 Building Blocks of Human Decision Making
5 Error Management
6 Neuroethology of Decision Making
7 Decision Making: What Can Evolution Do for Us?
Robustness in a Variable Environment
8 Robustness in Biological and Social Systems
9 Robust Neural Decision Making
10 Advantages of Cognitive Limitations
11 Modularity and Decision Limitations
12 Robustness in a Variable Environment
Variation in Decision Making
13 Biological Analogs of Personality
14 Sources of Variation Within the Individual
15 Variation in Decision Making
Evolutionary Perspectives on Social Cognition
16 The Cognitive Underpinnings of Social Behavior: Selectivity in Social Cognition
17 Early Social Cognition: How Psychological Mechanisms Can Inform Models of Decision Making
18 Who Cares? Other-Regarding Concerns-Decisions with Feeling
19 Learning, Cognitive Limitations, and the Modeling of Social Behavior
20 Evolutionary Perspectives on Social Cognition
Bibliography
Subject Index

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