Abstract:
e propose that humans may not meaningfully retain high-variance environmental feedback, a behavior that likely evolved in a past environment with unfavorable fitness tradeoffs from overcommitting attention. We argue that in such settings, humans instead rely on an innate estimate of future payoffs optimized for their evolutionary past of cultural learning: learning from knowledge taught by fellow group members, rather than from the environmental feedback itself. A veridical decision-theoretic model of this evolutionary past can help explain several puzzles of human behavior: (a) the hard-easy effect, the overconfidence (respectively, underconfidence) of one’s estimate of her ability in a difficult task (respectively, easy task); (b) underinference, the persistence of the aforementioned flawed belief in the face of evidence to the contrary; (c) the non-monotonicity of confidence with respect to the level of experience; (d) persistent vulnerability to charlatans; and (e) the situational effectiveness of marginal educational interventions. This finding corroborates the thesis [1, 2] that dual inheritance theory is an ideal candidate to be a cumulative theoretical framework for the psychological sciences. Our evolutionary theory and its predictions also have foundational policy implications, particularly for education.
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