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The next objection directly confronts the standard picture of rationality, which defines rationality in terms of the rules of logic, probability, and decision-making. This seems to be where Gigerenzer’s fundamental disagreement with pessimists lies. As Gigerenzer notes, his main disagreement with the pessimism in the heuristics and biases programme is that it ‘does not question the norms [of logic and probability] themselves’ and ‘it retains the norms and interprets deviations from these norms as cognitive illusions’ (Gigerenzer 2008, 6).

The standard picture is problematic, according to Gigerenzer:

Humans have evolved in natural environments, both social and physical. To survive, reproduce, and evolve, the task is to adapt to these environments, or else to change them. […] The structure of natural environments, however, is ecological rather than logical. (Gigerenzer 2008, 7)

The problem identified by Gigerenzer is that the standard picture neglects the role of environment, which is a crucial factor for biological success. As an alternative to the standard picture of rationality, Gigerenzer offers the ecological picture of rationality, which characterizes rationality in terms of cognitive success in the relevant environment. According to the standard picture, rationality requires a fit between the mind and the rules of logic, probability, and decision-making, while ecological rationality requires a ‘fit between structures of information-processing mechanisms in the mind and structures of information in the world’ (Todd & Gigerenzer 2007, 170).

When we evaluate human reasoning performance in light of the ecological picture rather than the standard picture, the pessimistic interpretation is no longer warranted. For example, the information about probability available in the ancient environment was represented in the frequency format (e.g., ‘3 rainy days in 10 days’ rather than ‘30% chance of rain’). As we have seen, human reasoning performance is relatively good when the questions are represented in the frequency format. Thus, human probabilistic reasoning seems to be ecologically rational; it worked successfully in the ancient environment in which probability was represented in the frequency format.

A similar argument can be made about the Wason selection task. One might speculate that information about cheaters (those who receive the benefit of cooperation without contributing to it) was particularly salient in ancient societies (Cosmides & Tooby 1992). Indeed, failing to detect cheaters is a serious challenge to the maintenance of altruistic behaviours (e.g., Trivers 1971). It turns out that the Wason selection task becomes less challenging when the content of the statement to be falsified is an example of a social exchange rule. Alternative versions of the selection task were devised to test the hypothesis that a participant’s performance improves when the statement tested is a cheater-detection rule (Cosmides 1989). For instance, Richard Griggs and James Cox (1982) asked participants to imagine a police officer checking whether people drinking in a bar respect the following rule: ‘If you drink alcohol, then you must be over twenty-one years of age.’ The cards had on their visible sides one of the following: ‘Beer’, ‘Coke’, ‘22 years’, and ‘16 years’. In this situation, the majority of participants (correctly) choose the ‘Beer’ card and the ‘16 years’ card. It could be argued, then, that human deductive reasoning is ecologically rational.

In effect, Gigerenzer introduces an alternative conception of rationality, namely the ecological conception of rationality, and argues that human reasoning meets the requirements of ecological rationality. Thus, we seem to have two conceptions of rationality that yield two different interpretations of the experimental results. Our conclusion is pessimistic (‘Humans are irrational’) when human reasoning performance is evaluated in light of the standard picture. However, our conclusion is optimistic (‘Humans are rational’) when human reasoning performance is evaluated in light of the ecological picture.

A problem with this ‘ecological rationality objection’ is that it seems to conflate biological adaptiveness and rationality. For instance, Stanovich writes:

Evolutionarily adaptive behavior is not the same as rational behavior. Evolutionary psychologists obscure this by sometimes implying that if a behavior is adaptive it is rational. […] I think a conflation of these interests is at the heart of the disputes between researchers working in the heuristics and biases tradition and their critics in the evolutionary psychology camp. (Stanovich 2009, 55–56)

Certainly, it could be biologically adaptive to have a cognitive system that is especially good at dealing with frequencies but not very good at dealing with probabilities. But is such a system not only adaptive but also rational? This issue is closely related to the aim or purpose of cognition, which we will discuss in the next section.

Another problem is that the ecological picture seems to imply that humans used to be rational, but they no longer are. The concern, expressed again by Stanovich, is that human reasoning styles probably used to be successful in the ancient environment, but are no longer successful in the current environment, where probabilities tend not to be represented in a frequentist format, and information about cheaters no longer has special biological significance:

Unfortunately, the modern world tends to create situations where some of the default values of evolutionarily adapted cognitive systems are not optimal. […] [M]odern technological societies continually spawn situations where humans must decontextualize information – where they must deal abstractly and in a depersonalized manner with information. (Stanovich 2004, 122)

It is therefore a challenge to defend optimism even when adopting the ecological picture of human rationality. Our temporary conclusion is that none of the objections reviewed so far constitute a serious threat to the pessimistic interpretation of the experimental results. In the next section, we will explore another issue, which is closely related to the dispute between the standard picture and the ecological picture.