The ecological rationality of mechanisms evolved to make up minds

Selective pressures favoring rapid decisions would have led to the evolution of simple decision-making mechanisms that could take the form of heuristics and rules that use as little available information as possible. Such decision heuristics can only be ecologically rational-yielding accurate inferences in particular problem domains-is they exploit the way that information is structured in the environment. The author presents a variety of fast and frugal heuristics that are ecologically rational and shows how they cart be organized in the mind's adaptive toolbox of decision-making strategies.