Abstract
How do we make decisions? Perhaps surprisingly, conventional decision theory does not attempt to answer this question. It tells us only which behavioral choices we ought to make if we follow certain axioms. In real life, however, axioms play no role in people's decision making. Our choices are governed instead by cognitive mechanisms shaped over evolutionary time through the process of natural selection. From signal detection and memory to individual and social learning, evolution has created strong biases in how and when we process information, and it is these evolved cognitive building blocks that provide the foundation for our choices. An evolutionary perspective is thus necessary to shed light on the nature of how we and other animals make decisions. The authors of this book, who originate from a broad range of disciplines, including evolutionary biology, psychology, economics, anthropology, neuroscience, and computer science, engaged in a multidisciplinary discourse around the question of what it is exactly that 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. Almost paradoxically, this divergence from our primate relatives sets up imitation as one of the important mechanisms underlying human decision making. In addition to exploring the origins of decision mechanisms, the evolutionary approach in this volume sheds light on why and when these mechanisms are robust, why they vary across individuals and situations, and how social life impacts our decisions.
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