Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking. Login or Take a Tour!
- In primates, loss aversion may be a helpful rule-of-thumb rooted in monitoring of social tit-for-tat. “It’s possible that what we’re seeing in the context of these classic heuristics are actually strategies built for something else,” says Santos. “That doesn’t mean they’re bad or errors.” As Gerd Gigerenzer, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, in Germany, puts it, a strategy may be “ecologically rational”—the most successful method for solving real problems overall—even if it violates assumptions about rational decision-making.
- Humans, especially children, often make the “mistake” of over-imitating when they learn new skills. While over-imitation is not always the most efficient or rational way to solve a problem, it may be a way to pass on crucial information—including custom, etiquette, tradition, and ritual—that we need to be human.