Yaniv Hanoch: UCLA School of Public Health, Department of Health Services

Herbert Simon has warned us that an explanatory account of human rationality must identify the significance of emotions for choice behavior. Customarily emphasizing the cognitive dimensions of decision making, relatively few researchers have paid close attention to specifying the complex ways in which emotion may shape human thinking and decisions. Accordingly, this paper is an attempt to follow Simon’s suggestion and specify how emotions can enter into the theory of bounded rationality. To accomplish our task, we capitalize on Rom Harré’s work on causal powers, from which we propose a strategy to study the significance of emotion in decision-making processes. In an attempt to elaborate on an explanation of behavior by mechanism, we discuss a version of bounded rationality recently put forward by Gigerenzer, Todd, and the ABC Research Group (Gigerenzer et al. 1999; Gigerenzer & Selten 2001), the so-called adaptive toolbox of fast and frugal heuristics. Coupled with insights from evolutionary psychology and neuroscience, this version of bounded rationality gives us a better grasp of the functional role of emotions within the human decision machinery.
http://www.bec.ucla.edu/emotionalmechanismBEC.pdf