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

The effect of conspicuous consumption on men’s testosterone levels

Calories, beauty, and ovulation: The effects of the menstrual cycle on food and appearance-related consumption

With evolutionary psychology used as the theoretical framework, two aspects of gift giving among young adults are investigated: (a) sex differences in motives for giving gifts to a romantic partner, and (b) the allocation of gift expenditures among various relations, including romantic partners, close friends, close kin, and distant kin members. As per the evolved sex differences in mating strategies, it is proposed and found that men report tactical motives for giving gifts to their romantic partners more frequently than women. Also, there are no sex differences in situational motives for giving gifts. In addition, women are aware that men use tactical motives more often; whereas men think that these motives are employed equally by both sexes. With regard to gift expenditures it is found that, for kin members, the amount spent on gifts increases with the genetic relatedness (r value) of the particular kin. When all relations (kin and nonkin members) are included, the allocation of gift expenditures were the highest to romantic partners, followed by those to close kin members and then to close friends. The latter finding is explained via the importance attached to the evolved psychological mechanisms linked to each of the above relations, namely, reproductive fitness (for partners), nonreproductive fitness (for close kin members), and reciprocal altruism (for close friends). 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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An Evolutionary Psychology Perspective on Gift Giving among Young Adults.

One of the most ubiquitous creative copy decisions in advertising is to use young attractive women in decorative roles. Contrary to the mantra chanted by some staunch feminists, advertisers are not involved in a patriarchal white-male-dominated conspiracy to derogate, exploit, subjugate, and dominate women. Advertisers are concerned with providing messages that are maximally effective to their relevant target audience. Accordingly, they are well aware that in certain situations the use of decorative female models will appeal to a particular group of their constituency. Using evolutionary psychology as the explicative framework, it is argued that the greater use of young and attractive women in decorative roles in advertising is steeped in the differential mating strategies of the two sexes. An analysis of several content-analytic studies demonstrates that the more frequent use of women as young and attractive decorative models is longitudinally stable and culturally invariant further attesting to the Darwinian roots of this phenomenon. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Applying evolutionary psychology in understanding the representation of women in advertisements

The current paper serves two purposes. First, it reviews the neuroimaging literature most relevant to the field of marketing (e.g., neuroeconomics, decision neuroscience, and neuromarketing). Second, it posits that evolutionary theory is a consilient and organizing meta-theoretical framework for neuromarketing research. The great majority of neuroimaging studies suffer from the illusion of explanatory depth namely the sophistication of the neuroimaging technologies provides a semblance of profundity to the reaped knowledge, which is otherwise largely disjointed and atheoretical. Evolutionary theory resolves this conundrum by recognizing that the human mind has evolved via the processes of natural and sexual selection. Hence, in order to provide a complete understanding of any given neuromarketing phenomenon requires that it be tackled at both the proximate level (as is currently the case) and the ultimate level (i.e., understanding the adaptive reason that would generate a particular neural activation pattern). Evolutionary psychology posits that the human mind consists of a set of domain-specific computational systems that have evolved to solve recurring adaptive problems. Accordingly, rather than viewing the human mind as a general-purpose domain-independent organ, evolutionary cognitive neuroscientists recognize that many neural activation patterns are instantiations of evolved computational systems in evolutionarily relevant domains such as survival, mating, kin selection, and reciprocity. As such, an evolutionary neuromarketing approach recognizes that the neural activation patterns associated with numerous marketing-related phenomena can be mapped onto the latter Darwinian modules thus providing a unifying meta-theory for this budding discipline.




Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Gad Saad

Papers

The effect of conspicuous consumption on men’s testosterone levels

Calories, beauty, and ovulation: The effects of the menstrual cycle on food and appearance-related consumption

An Evolutionary Psychology Perspective on Gift Giving among Young Adults.

Applying evolutionary psychology in understanding the representation of women in advertisements

Evolutionary neuromarketing: darwinizing the neuroimaging paradigm for consumer behavior