Significance
In 1654, Blaise Pascal and Pierre Fermat laid the foundation for our current theory of decision making by developing the notion of maximizing expected value. A reasonable organism need only estimate the value of an outcome, weight this value by the probability of the outcome occurring, and choose the outcome offering the highest expectation. This view was formalized mathematically in the 20th century, but for the most part has remained unchanged. Despite the beauty of the theory, its descriptive validity has been plagued by contradictory data. In numerous cases, humans and other animals systematically violate the predictions made by decision theory. They seek risks when the theory predicts that they should avoid them. They prefer immediate rewards when they should wait. They place a premium on items in their possession when trading offers a better deal. In short, decision theory all too often fails to predict behavior.
In the rush to catalog violations of decision theory, economists and psychologists have failed to propose a viable alternative to the existing theory. When they did propose alternatives, they simply patched the existing theory. Whenever a new violation appeared, a new patch was placed on the old theory. Yet repairing the old theory poses two problems: First, having too many patches greatly complicates the theory and suggests that the foundation of the theory is flawed. Second, the original decision theory and its successors ignore two factors critical to understanding decision making: evolution and cognitive mechanisms.
The current mismatch between decision theory and data suggests that we must start afresh on a new theory of decision making. For the purposes of this Forum, we would like to dispense with utilities, values, expectations, and assumptions of well-ordered preferences. Instead, we would like to start with first principles to build a theory of decision making resting on an evolutionary foundation. Note that this will not be a theory of human decision making but a theory of decision making that transcends a particular species and explores the general principles of how evolution can generate a decision-making agents, biological or artificial.
We are, of course, not the first either to attempt a new theory of decision making or to integrate evolutionary thought with cognition. Behavioral economists are interested in theoretical progress, but as mentioned previously, they offer only a repair of the existing decision theory rather than a fresh rethinking of the theory. Neuroeconomists look for decision making in the brain, but rarely consider evolutionary perspectives. Evolutionary psychologists are interested in studying human cognition from an evolutionary perspective, but they do not try to build a general theory of decision making, and they seldom focus on cognitive mechanisms.
A Strüngmann Forum offers a unique and powerful opportunity to initiate a project that integrates a careful understanding of evolution with precise models of cognitive mechanisms to develop a Darwinian Decision Theory. This Forum would allow us to bring together experts in evolutionary theory, anthropology, behavioral ecology, decision theory, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, computational modeling, artificial intelligence, and robotics to hash out the evolutionary principles relevant to the mechanisms of decision making. We, of course, do not expect to fully construct the theory during the Forum, but bringing together expertise from these areas will allow us to more finely tune the approach needed to develop such a theory. To this end, there are four key components that must be examined: understanding the origins of the mechanisms, exploring why these mechanisms are robust, accounting for variation between and within individuals, and responding to uncertainty in the environment.
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