Ecological rationality and its contents

In light of risk perception and risk communication, this article analyzes the perceptions and interaction relationship between the local public, scientific experts, and the state toward technological risks, e.g. genetically modified organisms (GMO), under the development of global technological competitiveness. This article also points out that ”valuing scientific research and neglecting its risk” in a local social system which is continually surrounded with hidden risks would result in combination of mainstream scientific rationality and prominent technological policy resources. A dominant scientific view (system) easily develops and oppresses the opposite opinions from ecological rationality and high discontent of social rationality. As a result, monopoly of scientific rationality and submergence of ecological and social rationality are formed. This relationship lies in the gap of risk perceptions between the public, the state, and scientific experts: the public highly distrust scientists and specialists; scientists and specialists are dissatisfied with the state for lacking of a risk communication mechanism with the doubt of technological policy being misled or legitimacy of scientific research being deprived; the institutional capacity withers for not actively constructing a risk communication mechanism and social risk assessment. Namely, this article explores how a local social system surrounded with hidden risks devastates trust and accumulates unpredictable technological social consequences. In order to review and examine the development of high-tech countries and society, this article suggests that a sequence of particular problems in local and less advanced countries should be carefully examined based on an institutional constructed mechanism of risk communication and assessment. Also, active interventions are critical for reshaping the relationship between science, the public, and the nation.

BACKGROUNDMany of the reproductive decisions that humans make happen without much planning or forethought, arising instead through the use of simple choice rules or heuristics that involve relatively little information and processing. Nonetheless, these heuristic-guided decisions are typically beneficial, owing to humans' ecological rationality - the evolved fit between our constrained decision mechanisms and the adaptive problems we face.OBJECTIVEThis paper reviews research on the ecological rationality of human decision making in the domain of reproduction, showing how fertility-related decisions are commonly made using various simple heuristics matched to the structure of the environment in which they are applied, rather than being made with information-hungry mechanisms based on optimization or rational economic choice.METHODSFirst, heuristics for sequential mate search are covered; these heuristics determine when to stop the process of mate search by deciding that a good-enough mate who is also mutually interested has been found, using a process of aspiration-level setting and assessing. These models are tested via computer simulation and comparison to demographic age-at-first-marriage data. Next, a heuristic process of feature-based mate comparison and choice is discussed, in which mate choices are determined by a simple process of feature-matching with relaxing standards over time. Parental investment heuristics used to divide resources among offspring are summarized. Finally, methods for testing the use of such mate choice heuristics in a specific population over time are then described.1. IntroductionHumans make a variety of reproductive decisions throughout their lives, with the most important including who to choose as a mate, when to have offspring with that mate, and how to raise the children that result. Some of these decisions are consciously planned with great deliberation; others (probably the majority) may come about without deep thought, guided instead by simple strategies or rules of thumb and shaped by external environmental factors. And yet these common, less planned, more intuitive decisions often work out well in terms of reproductive success, leading to healthy members of the next generation. This happens despite the great uncertainty that may surround determining who will be a good mate or what is an appropriate way to provision one's children, and without needing to gather a lot of information about the possible courses of action before choosing a mate. In this paper, we outline some of the ways that simple heuristics can be used in making reproductive decisions, and how they can be studied. We begin with an overview of the perspective of ecological rationality within which this research is situated, before proceeding to cover investigations of heuristic rules for mate search and choice, parental provisioning of individual offspring, and decisions related to fertility.This research program on simple heuristics and their effectiveness in appropriate settings represents a new approach to questions in demographics. First, it builds a theoretically motivated, psychologically grounded framework for predicting and understanding population-level patterns of fertility-related behavior, based on the individual-level decision mechanisms that people actually use. Rather than the economists' vision of human decision making employing all of the available information, fully known preferences, and fully processed implications of both, simple heuristics are built on realistic assumptions of the limited information, time, and thinking that people are actually able to bring to bear on most of their choices. Second, this research program uses simulation models of these simple decision heuristics, in conjunction with empirical data from experiments and field observations, to test the effectiveness of the heuristics in different situations and their implications at the population level. …

A notion of rationality represents a structure that can be used to explain, evaluate, and recommend a certain course of action. Full rationality, independent of context, builds such a structure based on the rules of logic and statistical inference. Ecological rationality, on the other hand, focuses on the interaction between the human mind and the task environment. This chapter argues that ecological rationality can provide an operational framework for evolutionary medicine based on compatible foundational concepts. Risk literacy and numeracy methods developed on the basis of an adaptive toolbox approach constitute effective education tools. An evolutionary approach to medical education facilitates the integration of these accessible and well-retained educational tools for physicians and their patients, and can enrich public health policymaking.

Herbert Simon’s bounded rationality offers three principles for building a theory of behavior: (i) to study the process of actual decision making (as opposed to as-if models of expected utility maximization), (ii) to study how decisions are made in situations of uncertainty and intractability (as opposed to risk and ambiguity alone), and (iii) to study how minds adapt to environments (as opposed to modeling solely the mind or the environment). Economists hijacked bounded rationality by reinterpreting it to mean optimization under constraints, and psychologists by reinterpreting it as the study of cognitive biases, that is, deviations from optimization. This contradictory double-takeover silenced the revolutionary essence of Simon’s program. My colleagues and I have revived and extended Simon’s lost program, choosing the term ecological rationality to avoid any confusion. As opposed to the cognitive biases program, the study of ecological rationality is both descriptive and prescriptive. It investigates the repertoire of heuristics individuals or institutions have at their disposal (their adaptive toolbox) as well as the conditions under which each heuristic is successful and thus should be used, as measured by real-world criteria (the ecological rationality of heuristics). The study of the adaptive toolbox relies on observation and experimentation; the study of the conditions under which various heuristics should be used relies on mathematical analyses and computer simulations. This combination of descriptive and prescriptive analysis offers a novel perspective for behavioral economics and the study of decision-making in general.

To what extent are our moral beliefs rational? This chapter argues that the statistical learning accounts offered in Part II provide reason to think that many central beliefs about socio-moral rules are acquired through rational processes and that this confers on the beliefs an essential kind of rational credential. The beliefs are doxastically rational. However, even if the beliefs about the rules are doxastically rational, the rules themselves might be counterproductive for achieving our ends. Another way to evaluate the propriety of a rule is in terms of ecological rationality, that is, how well the rule works given our minds and environments. This chapter articulates a number of factors that contribute to the ecological rationality of a rule, and argues that act-based rules are plausibly are more ecologically rational than consequence-based rules.

Two Types of Ecological Rationality: Or How to Best Combine Psychology and Economics

The notion of ecological rationality sees human rationality as the result of the adaptive fit between the human mind and the environment. Ecological rationality focuses the study of decision making on two key questions: First, what are the environmental regularities to which people’s decision strategies are matched, and how frequently do these regularities occur in natural environments? Second, how well can people adapt their use of specific strategies to particular environmental regularities? Research on aging suggests a number of changes in cognitive function, for instance, deficits in learning and memory that may impact decision-making skills. However, it has been shown that simple strategies can work well in many natural environments, which suggests that age-related deficits in strategy use may not necessarily translate into reduced decision quality. Consequently, we argue that predictions about the impact of aging on decision performance depend not only on how aging affects decision-relevant capacities but also on the decision environment in which decisions are made. In sum, we propose that the concept of the ecological rationality is crucial to understanding and aiding the aging decision maker.

The two main ideas of this chapter are ‘ecological rationality’ and ‘fast and frugal’ heuristics. Ecological rationality aims to understand how people can be effective decision-makers by using simple heuristics or ‘rules of thumb’ that fit well with the structure of their actual decision-making environment (hence ‘ecological’). It has three principles: first, the metaphor of the mind as an ‘adaptive toolbox’; second, the mind’s ‘evolved capacities’ are raw materials out of which heuristics are constructed; third, better decisions can be taken using less information—‘less can be more’. Fast-and-fugal heuristics are simple, task-specific strategies for making judgements and taking decisions; they are one of the tools of bounded rationality. Gerd Gigerenzer’s work is centre-stage. His view of intuition aligns with an evolutionary view of the mind as an adaptive toolbox. Gigerenzer criticizes ‘Linda-type’ problems because they overlook the cognitive skills that enable human beings to go automatically beyond the information given to navigate an ambiguous and uncertain world. The chapter looks at three types of ‘fast-and-frugals’, the recognition-, social- and reason-based heuristics, and considers their relevance to and applications in business decision-making.

Today I am going to speak about the relation between ecological science and a Marxist analysis of contemporary capitalism. Many of you know the important paper by Heidi Hartmann entitled Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism. Borrowing from her, my presentation might well have as its subtitle: Harlequin Romance of Marxism and Ecology. By this I mean to refer not just to the books that made Toronto famous, which apparently now sell at a rate of one every six seconds, worldwide. I'm also alluding to the colors of traditional harlequin suit: a patchwork of red and green. The combination is certainly striking, but only a colorblind jester could claim that it represents a harmonious integration. And like a harlequin suit, the red of Marxism and the green of ecology are often patched together. They form alliances, more or less uneasy, based on a common opposition to what modern capitalism is doing to nature and humanity. But there is always a tension between them. Marxists suspect the tendency of ecologists to make nature their supreme value, supposedly above questions of class, while Greens criticize the left for accepting the productivist assumptions of modern industrialism and seeing humanity as more important than the planet it lives on. The couple have dated off and on for quite a while, but they haven't yet reached the point of living together. My object today is to show how both Marxism and ecology could benefit from more serious cohabitation. I'll do this using two examples, both taken from agricultural ecology: organic farming in North America and peasant agriculture in Costa Rica. The perhaps ironic moral of my comments is that Marxists could get along better with ecology if they stopped viewing it as objective, unbiased science. Or, to use a phrase which expresses my view of the long debate about scientific socialism and the Laws of Motion of society:

This chapter examines a recent controversy over how best to regulate the withdrawal of cooling water from adjacent waterways by large power plants in the United States. Complementing the philosophical musings in Chapter 7, the present chapter shows that the questions at the heart of those musings are present in every environmental rulemaking, no matter how narrow or technical it may appear to be. It argues that the EPA's Phase II rulemaking illustrates several limitations of cost-benefit analysis that have yet to be overcome in practice and that, in some cases, cannot be overcome even in principle.

Behavioral economists use psychological findings to evaluate and revise economic decision theory, to build models that correspond directly to observations of behavior, and to develop descriptive accounts for deviations from principles of neoclassical rationality. One of the main sources of psychological insight is the heuristics and biases research program. This chapter introduces another source of psychological insights, the ecological rationality of fast-and-frugal heuristics, and is organized as follows. First, the chapter juxtaposes psychological (a la Gigerenzer) with economic (a la Smith) views of ecological rationality, thereby connecting fast-and-frugal heuristics to a major source of inspiration and motivation for behavioral economists, namely experimental economics. Then, it briefly reviews a collection of articles illustrating how the successful use of heuristics in business decision making can be understood by using ecological rationality as an investigative framework. Finally, it locates the field of inquiry for behavioral economics on a continuum of scientific problem solving in the interval that Weaver (1948) called organized complexity. Simple heuristics deserve special attention from behavioral economists because they work best in this very interval where exact methods of optimization are structurally unfitting. Put together, these connections, examples, and arguments suggest that mainstream behavioral economics can gain from integrating this less-explored psychological framework. This integration starts by attempting to formulate effective decision rules as fast-and-frugal heuristics and exploring their ecological rationality.

Chapter 105 Rationality the Fast and Frugal Way: Introduction

Common coding proposes a shared representation in the brain between perception, execution, and imagination of movement. This neural-level representation is considered to support a “direct activation” of action by perception/imagination of movement at the behavioral level. We examine how this two-tier model, where a representation at the neural level supports “direct activation” at the behavioral level, relates to the notion of situatedness—the real-time access and use of environment structure for cognition. Reviewing four leading environment-oriented approaches to cognition (ecological psychology, situated action, distributed cognition, and ecological rationality), we show that the access and use of the environment structures proposed by three of these approaches require a mechanism that supports both representations and direct access. We argue that the two-tier common coding model provides such an integrated mechanism, and, further, it extends and refines the notion of direct perception.

Practical politics is plagued by an unabashed and unrelenting mutual demonization of a given ideology, with each side classing each other’s cluster of ideas as pathological, i.e. “indicative of disease” and/or “extreme or excessive” or hopelessly irrational. This chapter specifically argues that the demonization, or the pathologization of conservatism as an ideology runs on a straw man fallacy—that is, detractors (and vulgar catechumen-like defenders) blithely assume that conservatism is coextensive with an ideology. This chapter argues for the view that not only is political conservatism not an ideological worldview, it is a cluster of epistemic virtues that should temper the rationalistic impulse regardless of ideological commitments—at least within the domain of sociality. Epistemic conservatism in its most generic form is the idea that a belief has some presumption of rationality merely because it is held. Cognitive closure, otherwise known pejoratively as “new mysterianism”, is the view that the mind is structurally constrained in its computational power. Situated cognition, or ecological rationality, is a stance emphasizing rationality as being constitutive of activity, context, and culture. Social externalism is the view that much of our thinking is individuated in part by the linguistic and social practices of a thinker’s community. The social complexity thesis is the view that there cannot be a predictive science of politics to drive a radical reconstitution of society. Complexity in the social realm, intrinsically stochastic, is coordinated by a voluntary manifold of self-organizing emergent spontaneous orders. Though each of these theses have resonance to so-called “political” conservatism they are not political positions per se. Regardless of ideological commitments, a cast of mind displaying a significant over-preponderance of rationalist traits, could well be deemed a neurodevelopmental disorder.

Political scientists have proposed that party cues can be used to compensate for the public's well-documented lack of substantive political knowledge, but some critics have argued that applying party cues is more difficult than assumed. We argue that this debate has proven intractable in part because scholars have used ambiguous normative criteria to evaluate judgments. We use a unique task and clear normative criteria to evaluate the use of party cues in making political judgments among two samples: a sample of state legislators and an online sample of the public. We find that the public sample performs poorly when using cues to make judgments. State legislators make much more accurate judgments on average than even the most attentive segment of the public and are more likely to place less weight on irrelevant cues when making judgments, although there is evidence that both samples performed worse with the inclusion of non-diagnostic cues. We conclude with a discussion of the relevance of the results, which we interpret as showing that party cue use is more difficult than theorized, and discuss some practical implications of the findings.