natural rationality: beyond bounded and ecological rationality

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1 Natural Rationality: Beyond Bounded and Ecological Rationality Benoit Hardy-Vallée Department of Philosophy University of Toronto

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Decision-making is usually a secondary topic in psychology, relegated to the last chapters of textbooks. Most of the time these chapters acknowledge the failure of the “homo economicus” model and propose to understand human irrationality as the product of heuristic and biases, which may be rational under certain environmental conditions. Psychology pictures decision-making as a deliberative task, studied by multiple-choice tests using the traditional paper and pen method. Psychological research on decision-making assumes that the subjects’ competence in probabilistic reasoning – as revealed by these tests – is a good description of their decision-making capacities. This conception takes for granted (1) that the process of reasoning about action is identical to the process of decision-making and (2) that psychology documents either human failures to comply with rational-choice standards or how mental mechanisms are ecologically rational. In this talk, I argue that decision neuroscience (“neuroeconomics”) may suggest another approach for the study and the nature of decision-making. Research in this field show that information processing in decision is affective, embodied and prosocial: Evolutionary older neural structures, such as the limbic system or dopaminergic neurons, are highly involved in subjective risk and certainty assessment; somatosensory information is integrated in prefrontal areas and helps evaluating choices; In games where players may adopt fair or unfair attitudes, the first ones tend to be more frequent and the second ones elicit emotionally negative reaction.Moreover, I suggest (against bounded rationality) that these mechanisms achieve near-optimality in social decision-making and (against ecological rationality) that this optimality is not fitness-enhancing. Consequently, I argue that the study of decision-making should be construed as an investigation into “natural rationality” (the mechanisms by which cognitive agents make decisions) and that decision-making should be a central concern for psychology.

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Page 1: Natural Rationality: Beyond Bounded and Ecological Rationality

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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

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Ultimatum Game

Proposer

$9/$1 ...$1/$9$8/$2.... ...

Responder

Accept/reject

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Introduction Standard Descritptive Conceptual Normative Natural Rationality Conclusion

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‘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

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Thanks !

[email protected]

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