Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Deep Rationality: The Evolutionary Economics Of Decision Making, Douglas T. Kenrick, Vladas Griskevicius, Jill M. Sundie, Norman P. Li, Jessica Yexin Li, Steven L. Neuberg

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

What is a “rational” decision? Economists traditionally viewed rationality as maximizing expected satisfaction. This view has been useful in modeling basic microeconomic concepts, but falls short in accounting for many everyday human decisions. It leaves unanswered why some things reliably make people more satisfied than others, and why people frequently act to make others happy at a cost to themselves. Drawing on an evolutionary perspective, we propose that people make decisions according to a set of principles that may not appear to make sense at the superficial level, but that demonstrate rationality at a deeper evolutionary level. By this, we …