Journal
PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
Volume 362, Issue 1485, Pages 1531-1543Publisher
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2007.2051
Keywords
transitivity; revenge effects; rate maximization; trade-off; predation; delay reduction
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We expect that natural selection should result in behavioural rules which perform well; however, animals ( including humans) sometimes make bad decisions. Researchers account for these with a variety of explanations; we concentrate on two of them. One explanation is that the outcome is a side effect; what matters is how a rule performs ( in terms of reproductive success). Several rules may perform well in the environment in which they have evolved, but their performance may differ in a ' new' environment ( e. g. the laboratory). Some rules may perform very badly in this environment. We use the debate about whether animals follow the matching law rather than maximizing their gains as an illustration. Another possibility is that we were wrong about what is optimal. Here, the general idea is that the setting in which optimal decisions are investigated is too simple and may not include elements that add extra degrees of freedom to the situation.
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