ARE HUMANS REALLY SO BAD IN THE THEORY-BASED JUDGMENTS? THE EFFECT OF EVOLUTIONARY RELEVANCE OF THE CONTENT

Humans constantly have to detect co-variations among many events, especially the ones in their social surrounding. Imperfections of this process led some authors to argue that an 'intuitive scientist' is not capable of precise assessment of co-variations. Here the authors argue that the tasks used in previous studies contained information that could not have been relevant during our evolutionary past, and thus no functional heuristics could have evolved to successfully solve this kind of problems. To test this assumption they compared the accuracy of two kinds of theory-based judgments: in terms of our evolutionary past, one set of tasks contained relevant and the other irrelevant information. The participants were significantly more precise (but not faster) at judging the co-variations between the 'evolutionary relevant' variables. It seems that 'intuitive scientist' can make a rather fair estimate of co-variations in nature, but only when the failure does so might result in decreased chances of survival and/or reproduction.