The evolution of cognitive biases in human learning
| Autor: | Peter S. Park |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2022 |
| Předmět: |
Statistics and Probability
History Polymers and Plastics Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering General Biochemistry Genetics and Molecular Biology Cognition Bias Cultural Evolution Humans Business and International Management Ecological rationality General Immunology and Microbiology Learning environment Applied Mathematics Bayes Theorem General Medicine Social learning Cognitive bias Social Learning Causal inference Modeling and Simulation Hard–easy effect Psychology General Agricultural and Biological Sciences Cognitive psychology Overconfidence effect |
| Zdroj: | Journal of Theoretical Biology. 541:111031 |
| ISSN: | 0022-5193 |
| DOI: | 10.1016/j.jtbi.2022.111031 |
| Popis: | Cognitive biases like underinference, the hard-easy effect, and recurrently non-monotonic confidence are evolutionarily puzzling when viewed as persistent flaws in how people learn from environmental feedback. To explain these empirically robust cognitive biases from an evolutionary perspective, we propose a model of ancestral human learning based on the cultural-evolutionary-theoretic hypothesis that the primary selection pressure acting on ancestral human cognition pertained not to learning individually from environmental feedback, but to socially learning task-specific knowledge. In our model—which is inspired by classical Bayesian models—an ancestral human learner (the student) attempts to learn task-specific knowledge from a role model, with the option of switching between different tasks and role models. Suppose that the student's method of learning from their role model is a priori uncertain—in that it can either be successful imitation learning or de facto innovation learning—and the ecological fitness costs of meaningfully retaining environmental feedback are high. Then, the student's fitness-maximizing strategy does not retain their environmental feedback and—depending on the choice of model parameters—can be characterized by all of the aforementioned cognitive biases. Specifically, in order for the evolutionarily optimal estimate of confidence in this learning environment to be recurrently non-monotonic, it is necessary (as long as the environment's marginal payoff function satisfies a plausible quantitative condition) that a positive proportion of ancestral humans' attempted imitation learning was unknowingly implemented as de facto innovation learning. Moreover, an ecologically rational strategy of selective social learning can plausibly cause the evolutionarily optimal estimate of confidence to be recurrently non-monotonic in the empirically documented way: general increase with an intermediate period of decrease. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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