Journal
TRENDS IN ECOLOGY & EVOLUTION
Volume 28, Issue 8, Pages 474-481Publisher
ELSEVIER SCIENCE LONDON
DOI: 10.1016/j.tree.2013.05.014
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Counterintuitively, biases in behavior or cognition can improve decision making. Under conditions of uncertainty and asymmetric costs of 'false-positive' and 'false-negative' errors, biases can lead to mistakes in one direction but in so doing steer us away from more costly mistakes in the other direction. For example, we sometimes think sticks are snakes (which is harmless), but rarely that snakes are sticks (which can be deadly). We suggest that 'error management' biases: (i) have been independently identified by multiple interdisciplinary studies, suggesting the phenomenon is robust across domains, disciplines, and methodologies; (ii) represent a general feature of life, with common sources of variation; and (iii) offer an explanation, in error management theory (EMT), for the evolution of cognitive biases as the best way to manage errors under cognitive and evolutionary constraints.
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