Do we expect natural selection to produce rational behaviour ? For : Modelling Natural Action Selection

We expect that natural selection has resulted in behavioural rules that 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 is that the outcome is an 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 evolved, but their performance may differ in a " new " environment (e.g. the lab). 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. A second possibility is that we were wrong about what is optimal. The general idea here 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.