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

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

Includes bibliographical references (pages 369-426) and index.

List of contributors -- Six reasons for invoking evolution in decision theory / Peter Hammerstein and Jeffrey R. Stevens -- Putting mechanisms into behavioral ecology / Alex Kacelnik -- Machinery of cognition / Charles R. Gallistel -- Building blocks of human decision making / Nick Chater -- Error management theory / Daniel Nettle -- Neuroethology of decision making / Geoffrey K. Adams, Karli K. Watson, John Pearson, and Michael -- Platt -- Decision making : what can evolution do for us? / Edward H. Hagen, Nick Chater, C. Randy Gallistel, Alasdair Houston, Alex Kacelnik, Tobias Kalenscher, Daniel Nettle, Danny Oppenheimer and David W. Stephens -- Robustness in a variable environment -- Robustness in biological and social systems / Jessica C. Flack, Peter Hammerstein, and David C. Krakauer -- Robust neural decision-making / Peter Dayan -- Advantages of cognitive limitations / Yaakov Kareev -- Modularity and decision making / Robert Kurzban -- Robustness in a variable environment / Kevin A. Gluck, John M. McNamara, Henry Brighton, Peter Dayan, Yaakov Kareev, Jens Krause, Robert Kurzban, Reinhard Selten, Jeffrey R. Stevens, Bernhard Voelkl, and William C. Wimsatt -- Variation in decision making -- Biological analogs of personality / Niels J. Dingemanse and Max Wolf -- Sources of variation within the individual / Gordon D.A. Brown, Alex M. Wood, and Nick Chater -- Variation in decision making / Sasha R.X. Dall, Samuel D. Gosling, Gordon D.A. Brown, Niels Dingemanse, Ido Erev, Martin Kocher, Laura Schulz, Peter M. Todd, Franjo J. Weissing, and Max Wolf -- Evolutionary perspectives on social cognition -- The cognitive underpinnings of social behavior : selectivity in social cognition / Thomas Mussweiler, Andrew R. Todd, and Jan Crusius -- Early social cognition : how psychological mechanism can inform models of decision making / Felix Warneken and Alexandra Rosati -- Who cares? : other-regarding concerns decisions with feeling / Keith Jensen -- Learning, cognitive limitations, and the modeling of social behavior / Peter Hammerstein and Robert Boyd -- Evolutionary perspectives on social cognition / Robert Boyd, Benjamin Bossan, Simon Goñchter, Thomas Griffiths, Peter Hammerstein, Keith Jensen, Thomas Mussweiler, Rosemarie Nagel, and Felix Warneken -- Bibliography -- Subject index.

Print version record.

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.

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