The Paranoid Optimist: An Integrative Evolutionary Model of Cognitive Biases

By M. Haselton, Daniel Nettle. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2006

804 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Cognitive Neuroscience, General Decision Sciences

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b704ff3027735d7d56c36923825dc3614b755ffb

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Applied Psychology

In Cognitive Neuroscience

In General Decision Sciences

Citations in the corpus

The subtleties of error management (2010, methodology): “An influential theory in the recent evolutionary psychology literature is error management theory (Haselton, 2007; Haselton et al., 2009; Haselton and Buss, 2000, 2003; Haselton and Nettle, 2006).”
Adaptive attentional attunement: evidence for mating-related perceptual bias (2007, background): “Nevertheless, lower-order cognitive mechanisms are of great importance, as they provide the building blocks that shape adaptive higher-order social cognition and action (e.g., Haselton & Nettle, 2006; Klein et al., 2002; Kurzban, Tooby, & Cosmides, 2001).”
An Exploratory Inquiry into the Psychological Biases in Financial Investment Behavior (2013, background): “According to Haselton and Nettle [2006], “one of the curiosities of human cognition—the fact that it seems riddled with biases—may be a functional feature of mechanisms for making judgments and decisions” (p. 47). For example, “limits to learning” is one reason people have biases. Montier [2002b] ex”
Disgust: evolved function and structure. (2013, background): “…process that occurs should be tuned to reflect the costs of committing two possible errors: Type I (assuming a threat when none is actually present—a false alarm) and Type II (failing to detect a threat when one is present—a miss; Haselton & Nettle, 2006; Nesse, 2005; Tooby & Cosmides, 1990).”
Psychology of Human Kin Recognition: Heuristic Cues, Erroneous Inferences, and Their Implications (2008, background): “Because these costs must be considered in terms of fitness implications, these relative costs may vary greatly depending on several factors.”
The Behavioral Immune System: Implications for Social Cognition, Social Interaction, and Social Influence (2016, background): “…is not simply a product of random signal detection error; it is also the product of cognitive mechanisms that evolved to adaptively manage the fitness implications associated with different kinds of signal detection errors (Haselton & Nettle, 2006; Haselton, Nettle, & Murray, 2016).”
The evolutionary psychology of leadership (2014, background): “The question of why such cognitive biases should exist is one that has been explored by evolutionary psychologists through the lens of error management theory (EMT; Haselton & Buss, 2000; Haselton & Nettle, 2006).”
Naturally Green: Harnessing Stone Age Psychological Biases to Foster Environmental Behavior (2014, background): “An evolutionary perspective suggests that such judgments may reflect a deeper ecological rationality meaning that the human mind is optimized to solve problems the way they presented themselves in the ancestral environment (Haselton & Nettle, 2006).”
Renovating the Pyramid of Needs: Contemporary Extensions Built Upon Ancient Foundations (2010, positive): “…costly, threat-avoidance systems are likely to be set like smoke alarms, favoring false positive alarms rather than false negative complacency (Haselton & Nettle, 2006; Nesse, 2005; Rozin & Royzman, 2001); it is better to unnecessarily flee a misperceived potential threat than to mistakenly…”
The Use of Judgement Bias to Assess Welfare in Farm Livestock (2015, background): “The interaction between emotion and cognition has an adaptive value, as it helps to memorise information or make judgements about circumstances or stimuli (Mineka et al 1998; Paul et al 2005; Haselton & Nettle 2006).”