Browse

Do animals have cognitive maps? Do they possess knowledge? Do they plan for the future? Do they understand that others have mental lives of their own? This volume provides a state-of-the-art assessment of animal cognition, with experts from psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, ecology, and evolutionary biology addressing these questions in an integrative fashion. It summarizes the latest research, identifies areas where consensus has been reached, and takes on current controversies. Over the last thirty years, the field has shifted from the collection of anecdotes and the pursuit of the subjective experience of animals to a rigorous, hypothesis-driven experimental approach. Taking a skeptical stance, this volume stresses the notion that in many cases relatively simple rules may account for rather complex and flexible behaviors. The book critically evaluates current concepts and puts a strong focus on the psychological mechanisms that underpin animal behavior. It offers comparative analyses that reveal common principles as well as adaptations that evolved in particular species in response to specific selective pressures. It assesses experimental approaches to the study of animal navigation, decision making, social cognition, and communication and suggests directions for future research. The book promotes a research program that seeks to understand animals’ cognitive abilities and behavioral routines as individuals and as members of social groups.

Conscious control enables human decision makers to override routines, to exercise willpower, to find innovative solutions, to learn by instruction, to decide collectively, and to justify their choices. These and many more advantages come, however, at a price. The ability to process information consciously is severely limited. Conscious decision makers are liable to hundreds of biases, yet measured against the norms of rational choice theory, they perform poorly. If they forego conscious control, in appropriate tasks, humans perform surprisingly better. This inaugural Strüngmann Forum Report explores the human ability to make decisions: consciously as well as without conscious control; deliberate and intuitive; explicit and implicit; processing information serially and in parallel; with a general-purpose apparatus or with task-specific neural subsystems. The analysis taken is at four levels—neural, psychological, evolutionary, and institutional—and discussion is extended to the definition of social problems and the design of better institutional interventions. The results presented differ greatly from what one expects under standard rational choice theory and deviate even more from the alternate behavioral view of institutions. Some purported social problems almost disappear if one adopts a more adequate model of human decision making. Yet new challenges emerge, in particular, that of free will.

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.