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  1. Cognitive Science of Religion and the Study of Theological Concepts.Helen De Cruz - 2014 - Topoi 33 (2):487-497.
    The cultural transmission of theological concepts remains an underexplored topic in the cognitive science of religion (CSR). In this paper, I examine whether approaches from CSR, especially the study of content biases in the transmission of beliefs, can help explain the cultural success of some theological concepts. This approach reveals that there is more continuity between theological beliefs and ordinary religious beliefs than CSR authors have hitherto recognized: the cultural transmission of theological concepts is influenced by content biases that also (...)
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  • Modelling the truth of scientific beliefs with cultural evolutionary theory.Krist Vaesen & Wybo Houkes - 2014 - Synthese 191 (1).
    Evolutionary anthropologists and archaeologists have been considerably successful in modelling the cumulative evolution of culture, of technological skills and knowledge in particular. Recently, one of these models has been introduced in the philosophy of science by De Cruz and De Smedt (Philos Stud 157:411–429, 2012), in an attempt to demonstrate that scientists may collectively come to hold more truth-approximating beliefs, despite the cognitive biases which they individually are known to be subject to. Here we identify a major shortcoming in that (...)
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  • Fatal Attraction? Why Sperber’s Attractors do not Prevent Cumulative Cultural Evolution.Catherine Driscoll - 2011 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 62 (2):301-322.
    In order to explain why cultural traits remain stable despite the error-proneness of social learning, Dan Sperber has proposed that human psychology and ecology lead to cultural traits being transformed in the direction of attractors. This means that simple-minded Darwinian models of cultural evolution are not appropriate. Some scientists and philosophers have been concerned that Sperber’s notion of attractors might show more than this, that attractors destroy subtle cultural variation and prevent adaptive cultural evolutionary processes from occurring. I show that (...)
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  • Transmission coupling mechanisms: cultural group selection.Robert Boyd & Peter J. Richerson - unknown
    The application of phylogenetic methods to cultural variation raises questions about how cultural adaption works and how it is coupled to cultural transmission. Cultural group selection is of particular interest in this context because it depends on the same kinds of mechanisms that lead to tree-like patterns of cultural variation. Here, we review ideas about cultural group selection relevant to cultural phylogenetics. We discuss why group selection among multiple equilibria is not subject to the usual criticisms directed at group selection, (...)
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  • Gene-culture coevolution in the age of genomics.Peter J. Richersona - unknown
    The use of socially learned information (culture) is central to human adaptations. We investigate the hypothesis that the process of cultural evolution has played an active, leading role in the evolution of genes. Culture normally evolves more rapidly than genes, creating novel environments that expose genes to new selective pressures. Many human genes that have been shown to be under recent or current selection are changing as a result of new environments created by cultural innovations. Some changed in response to (...)
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  • Memes revisited.Kim Sterelny - 2006 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 57 (1):145-165.
    In this paper, I argue that the adaptive fit between human cultures and their environment is persuasive evidence that some form of evolutionary mechanism has been important in driving human cultural change. I distinguish three mechanisms of cultural evolution: niche construction leading to cultural group selection; the vertical flow of cultural information from parents to their children, and the replication and spread of memes. I further argue that both cultural group selection and the vertical flow of cultural information have been (...)
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  • Not by genes alone: How culture transformed human evolution, by Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd.Stephen Shennan - 2008 - Biology and Philosophy 23 (2):293-299.
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  • Longtermism and Cultural Evolution.Aron Vallinder - forthcoming - In Jacob Barrett, Hilary Greaves & David Thorstad (eds.), Essays on Longtermism. Oxford University Press.
    In this chapter, I argue that the field of cultural evolution can usefully inform attempts to understand and influence the long-term future. First, I provide an overview of cultural evolution, covering what it means for culture to evolve, the mechanisms by which it happens, the crucial importance of cumulative cultural evolution for hunan history, and how cultural evolution (and in particular intergroup competition) has driven the rise of large-scale cooperation. Second, I draw out some possible lessons from cultural evolution for (...)
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  • The Conundrum of Modern Art.Jan Verpooten & Siegfried Dewitte - 2017 - Human Nature 28 (1):16-38.
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  • A defence of the evolutionary debunking argument.Man Him Ip - 2021 - Dissertation, University of Birmingham
    In this thesis, I will explore the epistemological evolutionary debunking arguments in meta-ethics. I will defend these arguments by accomplishing two tasks: I will offer the best way to understand the EDA and I will also respond to two strongest objections to the EDA. Firstly, in Part I of this thesis, I will offer my account of how the EDA should be best formulated. I will start from how evolution has significantly influenced our moral beliefs. I will then explain why, (...)
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  • Culture and Cognitive Science.Andreas De Block & Daniel Kelly - 2022 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Human behavior and thought often exhibit a familiar pattern of within group similarity and between group difference. Many of these patterns are attributed to cultural differences. For much of the history of its investigation into behavior and thought, however, cognitive science has been disproportionately focused on uncovering and explaining the more universal features of human minds—or the universal features of minds in general. -/- This entry charts out the ways in which this has changed over recent decades. It sketches the (...)
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  • Modeling a Cognitive Transition at the Origin of Cultural Evolution Using Autocatalytic Networks.Liane Gabora & Mike Steel - 2020 - Cognitive Science 44 (9):e12878.
    Autocatalytic networks have been used to model the emergence of self‐organizing structure capable of sustaining life and undergoing biological evolution. Here, we model the emergence of cognitive structure capable of undergoing cultural evolution. Mental representations (MRs) of knowledge and experiences play the role of catalytic molecules, and interactions among them (e.g., the forging of new associations) play the role of reactions and result in representational redescription. The approach tags MRs with their source, that is, whether they were acquired through social (...)
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  • Rethinking prestige bias.Azita Chellappoo - 2020 - Synthese 198 (9):8191-8212.
    Some cultural evolution researchers have argued for the importance of prestige bias as a systematic and widespread social learning bias, that structures human social learning and cultural transmission patterns. Broadly speaking, prestige bias accounts understand it as a bias towards copying ‘prestigious’ individuals. Prestige bias, along with other social learning biases, has been argued to pay a crucial role in allowing cumulative cultural selection to take place, thereby generating adaptations that are key to our success as a species. However, I (...)
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  • (2 other versions)The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science | Vol 75, No 1.Mathieu Charbonneau - 2019 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 71 (4):1209-1233.
    A leading idea of cultural evolutionary theory is that for human cultures to undergo evolutionary change, cultural transmission must generally serve as a high-fidelity copying process. In analogy to genetic inheritance, the high fidelity of human cultural transmission would act as a safeguard against the transformation and loss of cultural information, thus ensuring both the stability and longevity of cultural traditions. Cultural fidelity would also serve as the key difference-maker between human cumulative cultures and non-human non-cumulative traditions, explaining why only (...)
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  • Explaining culture. A constraint-based approach.Acosta Calvo Josu - 2017 - Dissertation, Universidad Del Pais Vasco
    The three main naturalistic approaches to culture the Epidemiological account (Sperber 1996; Atran 1990, 2002; Sperber and Claidière 2006), Memetics (Dawkins 2006 [1976], Dennett 1996) and the Standard Evolutionary approach (Boyd and Richerson 1988 [1985], Mesoudi 2011) reduce it to a set of representational items that are shared by individuals in a population by non-genetic means. Thats why I see those three approaches as versions of what I call the Itemic View of Culture (IVC). I argue that, by that reduction, (...)
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  • Ultimate and proximate explanations of strong reciprocity.Jack Vromen - 2017 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 39 (3):25.
    Strong reciprocity has recently been subject to heated debate. In this debate, the “West camp” :231–262, 2011), which is critical of the case for SR, and the “Laland camp” :1512–1516, 2011, Biol Philos 28:719–745, 2013), which is sympathetic to the case of SR, seem to take diametrically opposed positions. The West camp criticizes advocates of SR for conflating proximate and ultimate causation. SR is said to be a proximate mechanism that is put forward by its advocates as an ultimate explanation (...)
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  • Modularity in Biological and Cultural Evolution.Hisashi Nakao - 2012 - Journal of the Japan Association for Philosophy of Science 40 (1):1-8.
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  • Parochial prosocial religions: Historical and contemporary evidence for a cultural evolutionary process.Ara Norenzayan, Azim F. Shariff, Will M. Gervais, Aiyana K. Willard, Rita A. McNamara, Edward Slingerland & Joseph Henrich - 2016 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 39.
    In our response to the 27 commentaries, we refine the theoretical claims, clarify several misconceptions of our framework, and explore substantial disagreements. In doing so, we show that our framework accommodates multiple historical scenarios; debate the historical evidence, particularly about “pre-Axial” religions; offer important details about cultural evolutionary theory; clarify the termprosociality;and discuss proximal mechanisms. We review many interesting extensions, amplifications, and qualifications of our approach made by the commentators.
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  • Predictive Success and Non-Individualist Models in Social Science.Richard Lauer - 2017 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 47 (2):145-161.
    The predictive inadequacy of the social sciences is well documented, and philosophers have sought to diagnose it. This paper examines Brian Epstein’s recent diagnosis. He argues that the social sciences treat the social world as entirely composed of individual people. Instead, social scientists should recognize that material, non-individualistic entities determine the social world, as well. First, I argue that Epstein’s argument both begs the question against his opponents and is not sufficiently charitable. Second, I present doubts that his proposal will (...)
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  • I Eat, Therefore I Am: Disgust and the Intersection of Food and Identity.Daniel Kelly & Nicolae Morar - 2018 - In Anne Barnhill, Mark Budolfson & Tyler Doggett (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Food Ethics. Oxford University Press. pp. 637 - 657.
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  • The Evolution of Religion: How Cognitive By-Products, Adaptive Learning Heuristics, Ritual Displays, and Group Competition Generate Deep Commitments to Prosocial Religions.Scott Atran & Joseph Henrich - 2010 - Biological Theory 5 (1):18-30.
    Understanding religion requires explaining why supernatural beliefs, devotions, and rituals are both universal and variable across cultures, and why religion is so often associated with both large-scale cooperation and enduring group conflict. Emerging lines of research suggest that these oppositions result from the convergence of three processes. First, the interaction of certain reliably developing cognitive processes, such as our ability to infer the presence of intentional agents, favors—as an evolutionary by-product—the spread of certain kinds of counterintuitive concepts. Second, participation in (...)
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  • How to learn about teaching: An evolutionary framework for the study of teaching behavior in humans and other animals.Michelle Ann Kline - 2015 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 38:e31.
    The human species is more reliant on cultural adaptation than any other species, but it is unclear how observational learning can give rise to the faithful transmission of cultural adaptations. One possibility is that teaching facilitates accurate social transmission by narrowing the range of inferences that learners make. However, there is wide disagreement about how to define teaching, and how to interpret the empirical evidence for teaching across cultures and species. In this article I argue that disputes about the nature (...)
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  • Adaptive social learning strategies in temporally and spatially varying environments.Wataru Nakahashi, Joe Yuichiro Wakano & Joseph Henrich - 2012 - Human Nature 23 (4):386-418.
    Long before the origins of agriculture human ancestors had expanded across the globe into an immense variety of environments, from Australian deserts to Siberian tundra. Survival in these environments did not principally depend on genetic adaptations, but instead on evolved learning strategies that permitted the assembly of locally adaptive behavioral repertoires. To develop hypotheses about these learning strategies, we have modeled the evolution of learning strategies to assess what conditions and constraints favor which kinds of strategies. To build on prior (...)
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  • Culture and cognitive science.Jesse Prinz - forthcoming - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Evolved cognitive biases and the epistemic status of scientific beliefs.Helen De Cruz & Johan De Smedt - 2012 - Philosophical Studies 157 (3):411-429.
    Our ability for scientific reasoning is a byproduct of cognitive faculties that evolved in response to problems related to survival and reproduction. Does this observation increase the epistemic standing of science, or should we treat scientific knowledge with suspicion? The conclusions one draws from applying evolutionary theory to scientific beliefs depend to an important extent on the validity of evolutionary arguments (EAs) or evolutionary debunking arguments (EDAs). In this paper we show through an analytical model that cultural transmission of scientific (...)
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  • Learning Aspects of Hunting Via a Conformist Bias Could Promote Optimal Foraging in Lowland Nicaragua.Jeremy M. Koster & Maria D. Venegas - 2012 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 12 (3-4):203-222.
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  • Causes of cultural disparity: Switches, tuners, and the cognitive science of religion.Andrew Buskell - 2018 - Philosophical Psychology 31 (8):1239-1264.
    Cultural disparity—the variation across cultural traits such as knowledge, skill, and belief—is a complex phenomenon, studied by a number of researchers with an expanding empirical toolkit. While there is a growing consensus as to the processes that generate cultural variation and change, general explanatory frameworks require additional tools for identifying, organising, and relating the complex causes that underpin the production of cultural disparity. Here I develop a case study in the cognitive science of religion, and demonstrate how concepts and distinctions (...)
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  • The Evolution and Evolvability of Culture.Kim Sterelny - 2006 - Mind and Language 21 (2):137-165.
    In this paper I argue, first, that human lifeways depend on cognitive capital that has typically been built over many generations. This process of gradual accumulation produces an adaptive fit between human agents and their environments; an adaptive fit that is the result of hidden‐hand, evolutionary mechanisms. To explain distinctive features of human life, we need to understand how cultures evolve. Second, I distinguish a range of different evolutionary models of culture. Third, I argue that none of meme‐based models, dual (...)
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  • (1 other version)The evolution and development of human cooperation.Federica Amici - 2015 - Interaction Studies 16 (3):383-418.
    Humans have attained an unparalleled level of sophistication when engaging in collaborative and cooperative activities. Remarkably, the skills and motivation to engage in complex forms of collaboration and cooperation seem to emerge early on during infancy and childhood. In this paper, I extensively review the literature on the evolution and development of human cooperation, emphasizing important aspects of inter-cultural variation in collaborative and cooperative behaviour. This will not only allow us to confront the different evolutionary scenarios in which cooperation may (...)
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  • Which evolutionary model best explains the culture of honour?Stefan Linquist - 2016 - Biology and Philosophy 31 (2):213-235.
    The culture of honour hypothesis offers a compelling example of how human psychology differentially adapts to pastoral and horticultural environments. However, there is disagreement over whether this pattern is best explained by a memetic, evolutionary psychological, dual inheritance, or niche construction model. I argue that this disagreement stems from two shortcomings: lack of clarity about the theoretical commitments of these models and inadequate comparative data for testing them. To resolve the first problem, I offer a theoretical framework for deriving competing (...)
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  • Five Misunderstandings About Cultural Evolution.Peter Richerson - 2008 - Human Nature 19 (2):119-137.
    Recent debates about memetics have revealed some widespread misunderstandings about Darwinian approaches to cultural evolution. Drawing from these debates, this paper disputes five common claims: (1) mental representations are rarely discrete, and therefore models that assume discrete, gene-like particles (i.e., replicators) are useless; (2) replicators are necessary for cumulative, adaptive evolution; (3) content-dependent psychological biases are the only important processes that affect the spread of cultural representations; (4) the “cultural fitness” of a mental representation can be inferred from its successful (...)
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  • Bayesian collective learning emerges from heuristic social learning.P. M. Krafft, Erez Shmueli, Thomas L. Griffiths, Joshua B. Tenenbaum & Alex “Sandy” Pentland - 2021 - Cognition 212 (C):104469.
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  • A Experimental Demonstration that Cultural Evolution is not Replicative, but Reconstructive — and an Explanation of Why this Difference Matters.Thomas C. Scott-Phillips - 2017 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 17 (1-2):1-11.
    Two complementary approaches to a naturalistic theory of culture are, on the one hand, mainstream cultural evolution research, and, on the other, work done under the banners of cultural attraction and the epidemiology of representations. There is much agreement between these two schools of thought, including in particular a commitment to population thinking. Both schools also acknowledge that the propagation of culture is not simply a matter of replication, but rather one of reconstruction. However, the two schools of thought differ (...)
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  • (1 other version)The evolution and development of human cooperation.Federica Amici - 2015 - Interaction Studies. Social Behaviour and Communication in Biological and Artificial Systemsinteraction Studies / Social Behaviour and Communication in Biological and Artificial Systemsinteraction Studies 16 (3):383-418.
    Humans have attained an unparalleled level of sophistication when engaging in collaborative and cooperative activities. Remarkably, the skills and motivation to engage in complex forms of collaboration and cooperation seem to emerge early on during infancy and childhood. In this paper, I extensively review the literature on the evolution and development of human cooperation, emphasizing important aspects of inter-cultural variation in collaborative and cooperative behaviour. This will not only allow us to confront the different evolutionary scenarios in which cooperation may (...)
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  • The Evolution of Inclusive Folk-Biological Labels and the Cultural Maintenance of Meaning.Ze Hong - 2023 - Human Nature 34 (2):177-201.
    How is word meaning established, and how do individuals acquire it? What ensures the uniform understanding of word meaning in a linguistic community? In this paper I draw from cultural attraction theory and use folk biology as an example domain and address these questions by treating meaning acquisition as an inferential process. I show that significant variation exists in how individuals understand the meaning of inclusive biological labels such as “plant” and “animal” due to variation in their salience in contemporary (...)
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  • Cultural evolutionary theory as a theory of forces.Lorenzo Baravalle - 2019 - Synthese 198 (3):2801-2820.
    Cultural evolutionary theory has been alternatively compared to a theory of forces, such as Newtonian mechanics, or the kinetic theory of gases. In this article, I clarify the scope and significance of these metatheoretical characterisations. First, I discuss the kinetic analogy, which has been recently put forward by Tim Lewens. According to it, cultural evolutionary theory is grounded on a bottom-up methodology, which highlights the additive effects of social learning biases on the emergence of large-scale cultural phenomena. Lewens supports this (...)
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  • The role of attraction in cultural evolution.Nicolas Claidière & Dan Sperber - 2007 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 7 (1-2):89-111.
    Henrich and Boyd (2002) were the first to propose a formal model of the role of attraction in cultural evolution. They came to the surprising conclusion that, when both attraction and selection are at work, final outcomes are determined by selection alone. This result is based on a deterministic view of cultural attraction, different from the probabilistic view introduced in Sperber (1996). We defend this probabilistic view, show how to model it, and argue that, when both attraction and selection are (...)
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  • Do as I say and as I do: Imitation, pedagogy, and cumulative culture.Ellen Fridland - 2018 - Mind and Language 33 (4):355-377.
    Several theories, which attempt to give an account of cumulative culture, emphasize the importance of high‐fidelity transmission mechanisms as central to human learning. These high‐fidelity transmission mechanisms are thought to account for the ratchet effect, that is, the capacity to inherit modified or improved knowledge and skills rather than having to develop one's skills from the ground up via individual learning. In this capacity, imitation and teaching have been thought to occupy a special place in the explanation of cumulative culture (...)
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  • The Evolutionary Culture Concepts.Catherine Driscoll - 2017 - Philosophy of Science 84 (1):35-55.
    Most attempts to define culture as used in the cultural evolution literature treat culture as a single phenomenon that can be given a single nondisjunctive definition. In this article I argue that, really, cultural evolutionists employ a variety of distinct but closely related concepts of culture. I show how the main prominent attempts to define a culture concept fail to properly capture all the uses of “culture” employed in cultural evolutionary work. I offer a description of some of the most (...)
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  • What are cultural attractors?Andrew Buskell - 2017 - Biology and Philosophy 32 (3):377-394.
    Concepts from cultural attractor theory are now used in domains far from their original home in anthropology and cultural evolution. Yet these concepts have not been consistently characterised. I here distinguish four ways in which the cultural attractor concept has been used and identify three kinds of factors of attraction typically appealed to. Clarifying these explanatory concepts identifies problems and ambiguities in the work of cultural epidemiologists and commentators alike.
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  • Cultural longevity: Morin on cultural lineages. [REVIEW]Andrew Buskell - 2016 - Biology and Philosophy 31 (3):435-446.
    Morin has written a rich and valuable book. Its main aim is to isolate the factors involved in maintaining behavioural lineages over time, and to understand how these factors might interact. In doing so, it takes issue with the abstract and idealised models and arguments of dual-inheritance theorists, which are alleged in this account to rely on an overly simplistic notion of imitative learning. Morin’s book is full of ethnographic, anthropological, and psychological research, and there is much to commend in (...)
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  • Common minds, uncommon thoughts: a philosophical anthropological investigation of uniquely human creative behavior, with an emphasis on artistic ability, religious reflection, and scientific study.Johan De Smedt - unknown
    The aim of this dissertation is to create a naturalistic philosophical picture of creative capacities that are specific to our species, focusing on artistic ability, religious reflection, and scientific study. By integrating data from diverse domains within a philosophical anthropological framework, I have presented a cognitive and evolutionary approach to the question of why humans, but not other animals engage in such activities. Through an application of cognitive and evolutionary perspectives to the study of these behaviors, I have sought to (...)
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  • The cognitive foundations of cultural stability and diversity.Dan Sperber & Lawrence A. Hirschfeld - 2004 - Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8 (1):40-46.
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  • The Case for Memes.Matt Gers - 2008 - Biological Theory 3 (4):305-315.
    The significant theoretical objections that have been raised against memetics have not received adequate defense, even though there is ongoing empirical research in this field. In this paper I identify the key objections to memetics as a viable explanatory tool in studies of cultural evolution. I attempt to defuse these objections by arguing that they fail to show the absence of replication, high-fidelity copying, or lineages in the cultural domain. I further respond to meme critics by arguing that, despite competing (...)
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  • The Emergence of Cultural Attractors: How Dynamic Populations of Learners Achieve Collective Cognitive Alignment.J. Benjamin Falandays & Paul E. Smaldino - 2022 - Cognitive Science 46 (8):e13183.
    Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 8, August 2022.
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  • Origins of music in credible signaling.Samuel A. Mehr, Max M. Krasnow, Gregory A. Bryant & Edward H. Hagen - 2021 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 44:e60.
    Music comprises a diverse category of cognitive phenomena that likely represent both the effects of psychological adaptations that are specific to music (e.g., rhythmic entrainment) and the effects of adaptations for non-musical functions (e.g., auditory scene analysis). How did music evolve? Here, we show that prevailing views on the evolution of music – that music is a byproduct of other evolved faculties, evolved for social bonding, or evolved to signal mate quality – are incomplete or wrong. We argue instead that (...)
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  • The effects of social ties on coordination: conceptual foundations for an empirical analysis. [REVIEW]Giuseppe Attanasi, Astrid Hopfensitz, Emiliano Lorini & Frédéric Moisan - 2014 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 13 (1):47-73.
    This paper investigates the influence that social ties can have on behavior. After defining the concept of social ties that we consider, we introduce an original model of social ties. The impact of such ties on social preferences is studied in a coordination game with outside option. We provide a detailed game theoretical analysis of this game while considering various types of players, i.e., self-interest maximizing, inequity averse, and fair agents. In addition to these approaches that require strategic reasoning in (...)
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  • Modeling Discontinuous Cultural Evolution: The Impact of Cross-Domain Transfer.Kirthana Ganesh & Liane Gabora - 2022 - Frontiers in Psychology 13.
    This paper uses autocatalytic networks to model discontinuous cultural transitions involving cross-domain transfer, using as an illustrative example, artworks inspired by the oldest-known uncontested example of figurative art: the carving of the Hohlenstein-Stadel Löwenmensch, or lion-human. Autocatalytic networks provide a general modeling setting in which nodes are not just passive transmitters of activation; they actively galvanize, or “catalyze” the synthesis of novel nodes from existing ones This makes them uniquely suited to model how new structure grows out of earlier structure, (...)
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  • If we are all cultural Darwinians what’s the fuss about? Clarifying recent disagreements in the field of cultural evolution.Alberto Acerbi & Alex Mesoudi - 2015 - Biology and Philosophy 30 (4):481-503.
    Cultural evolution studies are characterized by the notion that culture evolves accordingly to broadly Darwinian principles. Yet how far the analogy between cultural and genetic evolution should be pushed is open to debate. Here, we examine a recent disagreement that concerns the extent to which cultural transmission should be considered a preservative mechanism allowing selection among different variants, or a transformative process in which individuals recreate variants each time they are transmitted. The latter is associated with the notion of “cultural (...)
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  • Optimization-Based Explanations.Graciela Kuechle & Diego Rios - 2015 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 45 (4-5):481-496.
    This article argues that evolutionary models based on selection validate, under appropriate conditions, the relevance of optimality as an explanatory mechanism in rational choice theory. The reason is that these frameworks share the mechanism that drives the results, namely, optimization, even if they situate it at different levels. The consequences of our argument are twofold. First, it resolves the tension between those predictions of rational choice theory that are accurate and the evidence showing that individuals seldom optimize. Second, it relativizes (...)
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