The Paranoid Optimist: An Integrative Evolutionary Model of Cognitive Biases

Human cognition is often biased, from judgments of the time of impact of approaching objects all the way through to estimations of social outcomes in the future. We propose these effects and a host of others may all be understood from an evolutionary psychological perspective. In this article, we el...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Personality and social psychology review 2006-01, Vol.10 (1), p.47-66
Main Authors: Haselton, Martie G., Nettle, Daniel
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Animals
Avoidance Learning
Bias
Biological Evolution
Cognition
Cognition & reasoning
Cognitive Dissonance
Culture
Evolution
Humans
Illusions
Internal-External Control
Judgment
Likelihood Functions
Models, Psychological
Paranoid Personality Disorder - psychology
Psychological Theory
Self Efficacy
Social Perception
Social psychology
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Summary:Human cognition is often biased, from judgments of the time of impact of approaching objects all the way through to estimations of social outcomes in the future. We propose these effects and a host of others may all be understood from an evolutionary psychological perspective. In this article, we elaborate error management theory (EMT; Haselton & Buss, 2000). EMT predicts that if judgments are made under uncertainty, and the costs of false positive and false negative errors have been asymmetric over evolutionary history, selection should have favored a bias toward making the least costly error. This perspective integrates a diverse array of effects under a single explanatory umbrella, and it yields new content-specific predictions.
ISSN:1088-8683
1532-7957
DOI:10.1207/s15327957pspr1001_3