Equation 1 · Ecological Rationality: When Biases Are Adaptations
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Symbol D
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What the article says around this equation
This is a rule about optimal thresholds, not merely an intuition, and it has a compact formal statement. A decision-maker observes ambiguous evidence D bearing on whether a state H holds — a predator is present, a partner is unfaithful, an approach signals romantic interest — against the alternative that it does not. Where is the fitness cost of a false alarm and is the fitness cost of a miss, the threshold that minimizes total expected fitness cost is to infer H whenever:
Sources cited in the article section
- [11] Error Management and the Evolution of Cognitive Bias ↗
- [10] Error Management Theory: A New Perspective on Biases in Cross-Sex Mind Reading ↗
- [12] The Evolution of Error: Error Management, Cognitive Constraints, and Adaptive Decision-Making Biases ↗
These citations give research context. Read each source to check which claims it supports.
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