Comments on study of human behavior
Relative to those of other organisms, human behavioral modules are flexible in their applicability to new problem domains. Compared to the universally optimizing decision strategies available to homo economicus, though, our behavioral modules are narrowly constrained. One strategy that has been available for decades is to model bounded rationality as the costs of search, a fruitful theoretical strategy. But as neurobiology, human behavioral ecology, and evolutionary psychology become more sophisticated, the adaptive problems that the human brain’s mental modules evolved to solve will become better defined. Once those problems are defined sufficiently, we might be able to make more precise – even content-specific – predictions about their effects on aggregate decision-making. The basic emotions, because they are adaptively old and relatively easy to define in function and physiology, are a fruitful starting point for attempting to account for brain modules in decision theory.