December 4 Martie Haselton, UCLA Communications
Biases in Social Cognition: Design Flaws or Design Features?
Error Management Theory (EMT) proposes that psychological mechanisms will be predictably biased when the ancestral costs of false-positive and false-negative errors were asymmetrical over evolutionary history.  This theory can explain men’s over-perception of women’s sexual intent, and it predicts a new bias in mind-reading in which women underestimate men’s commitment.  I will discuss several studies in which I have documented these predicted effects.  I will also present a study in which I documented  the “sister effect,” a condition in which men’s sexual over-perception bias is corrected.  In addition to predicting new effects, EMT helps to explain many previously documented biases in humans and non-human animals.  I will discuss several of these phenomena and then conclude by contrasting EMT with the heuristics-and-biases approach to understanding cognitive biases.