Adaptive bias
Encyclopedia
Adaptive bias is the idea that the human brain
has evolved
to reason
adaptively, rather than truthfully or even rationally, and that cognitive bias
may have evolved as a mechanism to reduce the overall cost of cognitive errors as opposed to merely reducing the number of cognitive errors, when faced with making a decision under conditions of uncertainty
.
Where the cost or impact of a Type I error is much greater than the cost of a Type II error (e.g. the water is safe to drink), it can be worthwhile to bias the decision-making system towards making fewer Type I errors, i.e. making it less likely to conclude that a particular situation exists. This by definition would also increase the number of Type II errors. Conversely, where a false positive is much less costly than a false negative (blood tests, smoke detectors), it makes sense to bias the system towards maximising the probability that a particular (very costly) situation will be recognised, even if this often leads to the (relatively un-costly) event of noticing something that is not actually there. This situation is exhibited in modern airport screening—maximising the probability of preventing a high-cost terrorist event results in frequent, low-cost screening hassles for harmless travelers who represent a minimal threat.
Martie G. Haselton and David M. Buss
(2003) state that cognitive bias can be expected to have developed in humans for cognitive tasks where:
. The focus is on the evolutionary trade-offs in cost between individual learning, (e.g., operant conditioning
) and social learning
. If more accurate information that could be acquired through individual learning is too costly, evolution may favor learning mechanisms that, in turn, are biased towards less costly, (though potentially less accurate), information via social learning.
Human brain
The human brain has the same general structure as the brains of other mammals, but is over three times larger than the brain of a typical mammal with an equivalent body size. Estimates for the number of neurons in the human brain range from 80 to 120 billion...
has evolved
Evolution
Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...
to reason
Reason
Reason is a term that refers to the capacity human beings have to make sense of things, to establish and verify facts, and to change or justify practices, institutions, and beliefs. It is closely associated with such characteristically human activities as philosophy, science, language, ...
adaptively, rather than truthfully or even rationally, and that cognitive bias
Cognitive bias
A cognitive bias is a pattern of deviation in judgment that occurs in particular situations. Implicit in the concept of a "pattern of deviation" is a standard of comparison; this may be the judgment of people outside those particular situations, or may be a set of independently verifiable...
may have evolved as a mechanism to reduce the overall cost of cognitive errors as opposed to merely reducing the number of cognitive errors, when faced with making a decision under conditions of uncertainty
Uncertainty
Uncertainty is a term used in subtly different ways in a number of fields, including physics, philosophy, statistics, economics, finance, insurance, psychology, sociology, engineering, and information science...
.
Error Management Theory
According to Error Management Theory, when making decisions under conditions of uncertainty, two kinds of errors need to be taken into account—"false positives", i.e. deciding that a risk or benefit exists when it does not, and "false negatives", i.e. failing to notice a risk or benefit that exists. False positives are also commonly called "Type I errors", and false negatives are called "Type II errors".Where the cost or impact of a Type I error is much greater than the cost of a Type II error (e.g. the water is safe to drink), it can be worthwhile to bias the decision-making system towards making fewer Type I errors, i.e. making it less likely to conclude that a particular situation exists. This by definition would also increase the number of Type II errors. Conversely, where a false positive is much less costly than a false negative (blood tests, smoke detectors), it makes sense to bias the system towards maximising the probability that a particular (very costly) situation will be recognised, even if this often leads to the (relatively un-costly) event of noticing something that is not actually there. This situation is exhibited in modern airport screening—maximising the probability of preventing a high-cost terrorist event results in frequent, low-cost screening hassles for harmless travelers who represent a minimal threat.
Martie G. Haselton and David M. Buss
David Buss
David M. Buss is a professor of psychology at The University of Texas at Austin, known for his evolutionary psychology research on human sex differences in mate selection.-Biography:...
(2003) state that cognitive bias can be expected to have developed in humans for cognitive tasks where:
- decision-making is complicated by a significant signal-detection problem (i.e. when there is uncertainty)
- the solution to the particular kind of decision-making problem has had a recurrent effect on survival and fitnessFitness (biology)Fitness is a central idea in evolutionary theory. It can be defined either with respect to a genotype or to a phenotype in a given environment...
throughout evolutionary history - the costs of a "false positive" or "false negative" error dramatically outweighs the cost of the alternative type of error
The costly information hypothesis
The costly information hypothesis is used to explore how adaptive biases relate to cultural evolution within the field of dual inheritance theoryDual inheritance theory
Dual inheritance theory , also known as gene-culture coevolution, was developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s to explain how human behavior is a product of two different and interacting evolutionary processes: genetic evolution and cultural evolution...
. The focus is on the evolutionary trade-offs in cost between individual learning, (e.g., operant conditioning
Operant conditioning
Operant conditioning is a form of psychological learning during which an individual modifies the occurrence and form of its own behavior due to the association of the behavior with a stimulus...
) and social learning
Social learning
Social learning may refer to:* Observational learning , learning that occurs as a function of observing, retaining and replicating behavior observed in ones environment or other people....
. If more accurate information that could be acquired through individual learning is too costly, evolution may favor learning mechanisms that, in turn, are biased towards less costly, (though potentially less accurate), information via social learning.
See also
- Guided variation and biased transmission – Adaptive biases in dual inheritance theoryDual inheritance theoryDual inheritance theory , also known as gene-culture coevolution, was developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s to explain how human behavior is a product of two different and interacting evolutionary processes: genetic evolution and cultural evolution...
- Psychological adaptationPsychological adaptationA psychological adaptation, also called an Evolved psychological mechanism or EPM, is an aspect of a human or other animal's psychology that is the result of evolutionary pressures. It could serve a specific purpose, have served a purpose in the past , or be a side-effect of another EPM...