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Natural Rationality: Beyond Bounded and Ecological Rationality
Benoit Hardy-Vallée Department of Philosophy University of Toronto
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‘standard conception’ of decision-making
vs.‘natural rationality’
descriptiveconceptualnormative
problems
descriptiveconceptualnormative
problems
Introduction Standard Descritptive Conceptual Normative Natural Rationality Conclusion
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Reasoning and decision making are high-level cognitive skills - (Johnson-Laird & Shafir, 1993, p. 1)
Decisions . . . are often reached by focusing on reasons that justify the selection of one option over another- (Shafir et al., 1993, p. 34)
special edition of Cognition on decision-making (volume 49, issues 1-2, Pages 1-187
Introduction Standard Descritptive Conceptual Normative Natural Rationality Conclusion
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Symmetry between reasoning about action and deciding
Folk-psychological
'Sense-Model-Plan-Act' picture
Paper and pen method
Introduction Standard Descritptive Conceptual Normative Natural Rationality Conclusion
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Robotics: distributed architecturescoordination of multiple modules
Psychology: sensorimotor simulationaffective processingconfabulation
Introduction Standard Descritptive Conceptual Normative Natural Rationality Conclusion
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(…) a widely used text of graduate- level readings in cognitive psychology, (Sternberg & Wagner, 1999) devotes the ninth of eleven chapters to "Reasoning, Judgment, and Decision Making," (...) A leading undergraduate cognitive psychology text (Goldstein, 2005) placed "Reasoning and Decision Making" the last of twelve chapters. (...) in a leading behavioral psychology text (Mazur, 2002), choice is covered in the last of fourteen chapters, and is limited to a review of the literature on choice between concurrent reinforcement schedules and the capacity to defer gratification (Gintis, 2007, pp. 1-2)
Introduction Standard Descritptive Conceptual Normative Natural Rationality Conclusion
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Introduction Standard Descritptive Conceptual Normative Natural Rationality Conclusion
categorization, inference, perception, emotion, personality make no sense without DM capacity
decisions increase fitnessnatural selection preserves good decision-makers
Psychology
Biology
“Genes are the primary policy-makers; brains are the executives”. (Dawkins)
“brains are ineluctably structured to make, on balance, fitness-enhancing decisions in the face of the various constellations of sensory inputs their bearers commonly experience” (Gintis, 2007, p. 3)
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Introduction Standard Descritptive Conceptual Normative Natural Rationality Conclusion
Simplified account of Rationality
P1: If humans are rational, they comply with Rational-Choice Theory
P2: Humans do not comply with Rational-Choice Theory
C: Humans are not rational
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Problems with P1
Problems with P2
RCT can be demandingThere is no one unique rational solutions in repeated games
P1: If humans are rational, they comply with Rational-Choice Theory
P2: Humans do not comply with Rational-Choice Theory
they fail to make linguistic inferences they reach market equilibriums in experimental gameswhen we take non monetary good into account, subject's behavior make sense
Introduction Standard Descritptive Conceptual Normative Natural Rationality Conclusion
Ultimatum Game
Proposer
$9/$1 ...$1/$9$8/$2.... ...
Responder
Accept/reject
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Introduction Standard Descritptive Conceptual Normative Natural Rationality Conclusion
‘unfair’ offers trigger moral disgust and cognitive conflict
11Sanfey, A. G., Rilling, J. K., Aronson, J. A., Nystrom, L. E., & Cohen, J. D. (2003). The neural basis of economic decision-making in the Ultimatum Game. Science, 300(5626), 1755-1758.
Ultimatum GameIntroduction Standard Descritptive Conceptual Normative Natural Rationality Conclusion
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Risk vs. ambiguity
greater activation in response to risk than in response to ambiguity.
greater activation in response to ambiguity than in response to risk.
rewardcomputation
fear/vigileance “Affective forecasting”Hsu, M., Bhatt, M., Adolphs, R., Tranel, D., & Camerer, C. F. (2005). Neural systems responding to degrees of uncertainty in human decision-making. Science, 310(5754), 1680-1683.
Introduction Standard Descritptive Conceptual Normative Natural Rationality Conclusion
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C: Humans are not rationalProblems with conclusion
if we are not, who is ?why behavioral ecology is predictive when classical economics is not?
A completely irrational species would have been eliminated by natural selection
Introduction Standard Descritptive Conceptual Normative Natural Rationality Conclusion
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Bounded Rationality
Ecological Rationality
‘cognitive illusions’
deviations
fitness maximizationoptimality in Environment ofEvolutionary Adaptation (EEA)
“Ultimately, ecological rationality depends on decision making that furthers an organism's adaptive goals in the physical or social environment”
(Gigerenzer & Todd, 1999, p. 364)
“deviations of actual behavior from the normative model are too widespread to be ignored, too systematic to be dismissed as random error, and too fundamental to be accommodated by relaxing the normative system. (…) the normative and the descriptive cannot be reconciled”(Tversky & Kahneman, 1986, p. s272)
Introduction Standard Descritptive Conceptual Normative Natural Rationality Conclusion
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Introduction Standard Descritptive Conceptual Normative Natural Rationality Conclusion
Natural Rationality
The descriptive and normative studies of neuro-behavioral mechanisms of decision-making
- between optimism and pessimism- no presupposition of fitness or cognitive illusions- not based on folkpsychology
Descriptive
Conceptual
Normative
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Introduction Standard Descritptive Conceptual Normative Natural Rationality Conclusion
Descriptive
Conceptual
Normative
ExperiencedUtility
PredictedUtility
RememberedUtility
DecisionUtility
[Affective forecasting]
[Hedonic affect][prediction error]
[Valuation]
[regrets]
CounterfactualUtility
[Regret forecasting]
[Regret /rejoicing]
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Introduction Standard Descritptive Conceptual Normative Natural Rationality Conclusion
Descriptive
Conceptual
Normative
Language
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Introduction Standard Descritptive Conceptual Normative Natural Rationality Conclusion
Descriptive
Conceptual
Normative
DM should be “the central organizing principle of psychology” (Gintis, 2007, p. 1).
DM should not be studied like a separate topic (e.g. perception), an occasional activity (e.g. chess-playing) or a high-level competence (e.g. logical inference)
Psychology should be the science of the mechanisms (normal and abnormal), development, individual and cultural variations, and neural implementation of decision-making in humans and animals.
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Introduction Standard Descritptive Conceptual Normative Natural Rationality Conclusion
Descriptive
Conceptual
Normative
2 ways to evaluate mechanisms
Internal: coherence between decision, predicted, rembered, counterfactual utility
External: efficiency and effectiveness of neural mechanisms
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Introduction Standard Descritptive Conceptual Normative Natural Rationality Conclusion
“creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praiseworthy tendency to die out before reproducing their kind”
- (Quine, 1969, p. 126)
disputable for inductions, much less for decisions
Thanks !
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