The human mind is filled with evolved decision mechanisms designed to meet adaptively important goals. In this article we lay out a framework for studying those mechanisms from the perspective of evolutionary psychology, emphasizing the importance of multiple influences of the environment on shaping the decision strategies and their operation. These strategies often take the form of simple heur...

In the present study we ask: Are people sensitive to the stability of a dynamic environment under short exposure to it? To examine this we investigate people’s cue manipulation and strategy application when instructed to learn to control an outcome in a dynamic system by intervening on three cues. The system was designed in such a ways that in the Stable condition participants controlled an out...

Values, rewards, and costs play a central role in economic, statistical, and psychological notions of decision making. They also have surprisingly direct neural realizations. This chapter discusses the ways in which different value systems interact with different decision-making systems to fashion and shape affectively appropriate behavior in complex environments. Forms of deliberative and auto...