Most of us are “irrationally” afraid of snakes…but few of us are afraid of mushrooms. Since both can be potentially fatal and both can be good eating, this is puzzling.
Most of us are “irrationally” afraid of snakes…but few of us are afraid of mushrooms. Since both can be potentially fatal and both can be good eating, this is puzzling.That’s from “Information, Evolution and Utility,” a paper by Jeroen Swinkels and Larry Samuelson about why natural selection shaped our preferences the way it did. In their story, Nature accepts that there are things that we can learn that she hasn’t had time to program into us (like which mushrooms are safe to eat.) So instead of giving us a complete set of instructions for how to behave in every situation, she gave us beliefs and the instinct to experiment and learn. Then she lets us choose.
But there are somethings she knows better than us . For example that snakes will likely kill us. So, forseeing that these beliefs she has given us can, and often do, go astray, she builds in backup measures to stop us from acting on them in contexts where she is confident that she knows best. Hence irrational fears.
I think there is wide open arbitrage opportunity in behavioral economics to import ideas from principal-agent theory to explain why Nature (the principal) has given us (the agent) certain preferences (incentives.)
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February 27, 2009 at 3:50 am
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March 20, 2009 at 1:44 pm
supagold
I see this line of argument fairly often, concerning terrorism vs other hazards, for instance. It always seemed to me that the difference was intent. Dangers which are perceived as being comprised of harmful intent, and are also unpredictable. IE, the you can’t be sure when the snake will strike, but you have the idea it “wants” to. The same with terrorists. Relatively more probable events that we perceive as purely chance or that we have control over seem less dangerous. (Car crashes, mushrooms, etc.)
Given malevolent self-aware cars (see Maximum Overdrive) or mushrooms that could sense your presence and choose to emit a poisonous cloud of spores, and I’d bet we’d see the same reactions.
June 25, 2009 at 10:27 pm
Emotions as an Incentive Mechanism « Cheap Talk
[...] nature has concocted to get us to do her bidding. I am on record in this blog as being a fan of this methodology. But I also maintain a healthy skepticism and not just at the tendency to concoct [...]
November 10, 2009 at 10:50 am
Guest Blogger: Jeroen Swinkels « Cheap Talk
[...] paper he wrote with Larry Samuelson on evolution and behavioral biases and I blogged about it here before. He’s got lots of ideas on lots of subjects so he is going to be a blogging natural. So [...]