Fast and frugal heuristics - simple rules for making decisions with realistic mental resources - are presented here. These heuristics can enable both living organisms and artificial systems to make smart choices, classifications, and predictions by employing bounded rationality. But when and how can such fast and frugal heuristics work? What heuristics are in the mind's adaptive toolbox, and what building blocks compose them? Can judgments based simply on a single reason be as accurate as those based on many reasons? Could less knowledge even lead to systematically better predictions than more knowledge? This book explores these questions by developing computational models of heuristics and testing them through experiments and analysis. It shows how fast and frugal heuristics can yield adaptive decisions in situations as varied as choosing a mate, dividing resources among offspring, predicting high school drop-out rates, and playing the stock market.

Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart

I. the origin of species by means of natural selection

In the Hamadryas baboon, males are substantially larger than females. A troop of baboons is subdivided into a number of ‘one-male groups’, consisting of one adult male and one or more females with their young. The male prevents any of ‘his’ females from moving too far from him. Kummer (1971) performed the following experiment. Two males, A and B, previously unknown to each other, were placed in a large enclosure. Male A was free to move about the enclosure, but male B was shut in a small cage, from which he could observe A but not interfere. A female, unknown to both males, was then placed in the enclosure. Within 20 minutes male A had persuaded the female to accept his ownership. Male B was then released into the open enclosure. Instead of challenging male A , B avoided any contact, accepting A’s ownership.

Evolution and the Theory of Games

Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution

How the mind works

INTRODUCTION Marketing managers habitually use sex as a form of segmentation since it satisfies several requirements for efficient implementation including profitability, identifiability, accessibility, and measurability (Dar-ley & Smith, 1995). Nevertheless, sex differences in marketing remain under-researched and continue to be a source of confusion for managers (Hupfer, 2002). Sex differences in cognitive processing are particularly relevant to e-business managers given that online consumers must process various types of spatial and perceptual information while navigating online. Despite the large body of evidence documenting consistent sex differences in cogni-tion (Kimura, 2004), there is a paucity of research exploring how male and female consumers respond differently to various website design aspects (Cyr Moreover, the few studies that have examined sex differences in online preferences were not grounded in any consilient theoretical framework. The main objective of this paper is to examine how sex differences in the processing of spatial and perceptual information lead to differential preferences in website design for men and women. We argue that sex differences in website design preferences are best understood within a framework based on both recent findings in neurocognitive psychology and on evolutionary theory (as originally reported in Stenstrom, Stenstrom, Saad, & Cheikhrouhou, 2008). Such a framework would enable e-business managers to tailor the design of their websites ac-The Neurocognitive and Evolutionary Bases of Sex Differences cording to the sex ratio of their clientele. In other words, depending on whether a website is equally visited by both sexes, or largely visited by only one of the two sexes, will determine the design features of the site in question. The structure of this chapter is as follows. First, the latest cognitive and neuropsychological evidence relating to sex differences in spatial and perceptual processing are explored, including a discussion of the particular selective pressures that have led to their emergence. This section also includes an examination of how these sex differences are likely to translate into the corresponding sex differences in the online processing of information. Next, website design recommendations for e-business managers are put forth, followed by a discussion of possible future research avenues.

The Neurocognitive and Evolutionary Bases of Sex Differences in Website Design Preferences: Recommendations for Marketing Managers

Exploring Video Games from an Evolutionary Psychological Perspective

Product Expertise: A Moderator of Information Search in Sequential Choice

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/147470490900700101

Gad Saad

Papers

The Neurocognitive and Evolutionary Bases of Sex Differences in Website Design Preferences: Recommendations for Marketing Managers

Exploring Video Games from an Evolutionary Psychological Perspective

Product Expertise: A Moderator of Information Search in Sequential Choice

Revisiting Thorstein Veblen's “Why is Economics Not an Evolutionary Science?”

The Role of Attribute Importance in Sequential Consumer Choice