1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910779367503321

Titolo

Evolution and the mechanisms of decision making / / edited by Peter Hammerstein and Jeffrey R. Stevens

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Cambridge, MA, : MIT Press, ©2012

©2012

ISBN

1-283-87014-2

0-262-30602-6

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (447 p.)

Collana

Strüngmann forum reports

Altri autori (Persone)

HammersteinPeter <1949->

StevensJeffrey R. <1974->

Disciplina

153.8/3

Soggetti

Decision making

Cognition

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

"Eleventh Ernst Strüngmann Forum held June 19-24, 2011, Frankfurt am Main."

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

""11 Modularity and Decision Making""""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""; ""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""

Sommario/riassunto

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.