Chapter 110 Social Heuristics

Some of the most challenging decisions faced by humans and other social species are those arising from an environment comprising the decisions of conspecifics. The particular demands of social environments such as the necessity of responding quickly to decisions made by others, coordinating mutual decisions, and detecting cheaters call for heuristics that make rapid decisions rather than spend time gathering and processing information over a long period during which a fleeter-minded competitor could leap forward and gain an edge. Socially rational agents can solve the adaptive challenges that face them in their interactions with conspecifics without amassing all available information and combining it optimally (as shown by the single-cue parental investment heuristics) and without calculating costs and benefits to guide search (as shown by the satisficing heuristics for mate search). They need not even follow the laws of propositional logic (as shown by the domain-specific cheater-detection reasoning results).