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Jeffrey R. Stevens

Jeffrey R. Stevens is Assistant Professor of Psychology and a faculty member of the Center for Brain, Biology, and Behavior at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

Titles by This Editor

Evolution and the Mechanisms of Decision Making

Edited by Peter Hammerstein and Jeffrey R. Stevens

How do we make decisions? Conventional decision theory tells us only which behavioral choices we ought to make if we follow certain axioms. In real life, however, our choices are governed by cognitive mechanisms shaped over evolutionary time through the process of natural selection. Evolution has created strong biases in how and when we process information, and it is these evolved cognitive building blocks--from signal detection and memory to individual and social learning--that provide the foundation for our choices.