ArticleEvolutionary human sciences2020
The evolution of distorted beliefs vs. mistaken choices under asymmetric error costs.
Article in Evolutionary human sciences, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed, 13 citations in OpenAlex.
- When norm change hurts.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Green preferences sustain greenwashing: challenges in the cultural transition to a sustainable future.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- (Why) Is Misinformation a Problem?Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2023Article
- Learning, exploitation and bias in games.PloS one · 2021Article
- How evolutionary behavioural sciences can help us understand behaviour in a pandemic.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2020Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Why do people sometimes hold unjustified beliefs and make harmful choices? Three hypotheses include (a) contemporary incentives in which some errors cost more than others, (b) cognitive biases evolved to manage ancestral incentives with variation in error costs and (c) social learning based on choice frequencies. With both modelling and a behavioural experiment, we examined all three mechanisms. The model and experiment support the conclusion that contemporary cost asymmetries affect choices by increasing the rate of cheap errors to reduce the rate of expensive errors. Our model shows that a cognitive bias can distort the evolution of beliefs and in turn behaviour. Unless the bias is strong, however, beliefs often evolve in the correct direction. This suggests limitations on how cognitive biases shape choices, which further indicates that detecting the behavioural consequences of biased cognition may sometimes be challenging. Our experiment used a prime intended to activate a bias called 'hyperactive agency detection', and the prime had no detectable effect on choices. Finally, both the model and experiment show that frequency-dependent social learning can generate choice dynamics in which some populations converge on widespread errors, but this outcome hinges on the other two mechanisms being neutral with respect to choice.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.