Cognitive biases: evol psych Flashcards
Are cognitive biases design flaws?
If evaluted based on accuracy and rationally of the underlying cognitive process. However, accuracy does not mean adaptive - the functionality of an adaptation is based on efficiency, economical, precise and reliable at solving adaptive probalems compared to alternative designs.
Just because you’re accurate does not mean your fitness will be high - accuracy only matters if it contributes to survival and reproductive success
What are the 3 categories of cognitive biases?
- Heuristics
- Biases as artifacts
- Error mangment biases
What are heuristics?
Necessary shortcuts or rules of thumb that humans use due to constraints on information processing
How are heuristics adaptive?
Favoured when cost of additional benefit to implement a more sophisticated strategy > potential benefits of superior accuracy
- Cost in real time - adaptive decisions often need to be fast
- individuals may not have the affordance of time, ability, or motivation to process information with high accuracy to solve adaptive problems
What is the Darwinian perspective on heuristics?
The goal of an organism is not to follow logic but to pursue objectives in its environment, such as establishing alliances, finding a mate, and protecting offspring
* an organism is rational depends on whether an organism can solve adaptive problems in the environment, not how logical the organism is
* Heuristics are “rational” when bias corresponds with an environmental structure in which the heuristics are optimal (ecological rationality)
What are artifacts?
apparent biases can arise if the task at hand is not one for which the mind is designed
How does artifacts arise from evolutionary novel problem formats?
problems that are beyond sensory inputs.
e.g. when calcuting statistics, information should be presented in frequency rather than probability format –> natural freq. e.g. how many times an event occured is more readily observable in nature VS probaitilies are mathematics abstractions that are more computationally demanding and require addtional information such as base rate of occurance
-> conjecture fallacy - Linda problem teller and feminist
How does artifact arise from evolutionary novel content?
When problems are not framed similar to adaptive problems (social contract violation), we are less able to use appropriate reasoning strategies e.g. if presented in purely logical vs presented to reflect a social exchange - huge drop in performance - no familiarity
Human mind has evolved psychological mechanism specifically designed to detect cheaters but not to detect logical rule violation
What are biases as error management?
Genuine biases - not a result of a shortcut but the biases itself serve evolved functions
What is signal detection theory?
For any receiving system, ifnormation processing performance is a two stage process:
* Discrimination - able to detect signal is relavent + with noises
* Decision - either made with liberal threshold (more false alarms, fewer misses) or conservative threshhold (fewer false alarms, more misses)
What is error managment theory?
EMT says that biases are not tuned to fit a model of expected payoffs but a model of expected fitness in survival and reproductive odds
What is the premise of error managment theory?
In ideal word -> evovled psych mech makes no error, however realistically -> errors are proabable -> each error have different fitness implications when commited -> natural selection would favour evolved psychological mechanism that are biased towards generating that are least costly when errors are committed - biases are domain specific and we commit an error over an other as its the least costly
Is cognition needed for biases?
No, as long as the bias is shaped in a way to avoid the more costly error. e.g. behavioral bias like seeing smth running at you does not need cognition -> you dont need critical thinking to face a predator, just run -> its more cost effective than to process if the thing running at you is a predator
What are conspiracy beliefs?
Belief in one or more consipracy theories that seek to provide causal explanations to global or societal events
What is the conspiracy belief as a byproduct hypothesis?
Conspiracy theory is a byproduct of the following evovled psych mechanism of
* associative learning
* agency detection
* self-protection system
* coalition/alliance detection
