Gigerenzer’s Evolutionary Arguments against Rational Choice Theory: An Assessment

Rational Choice Theory (RCT) is, without question, one of the most important accounts of how we make decisions; despite this, though, its plausibility has been vigorously debated over many years. A recent innovation in this debate has been to appeal to evolutionary theory: both defenders and critics of RCT have come to build their positions in essential ways on evolutionary biological considerations. In this paper, I critically discuss this „evolutionary turn‟ in the debate surrounding RCT further. To do this, I consider a specific set of evolutionary arguments: namely, those by a group of researchers surrounding Gerd Gigerenzer. In particular, Gigerenzer et al. argue that considerations based on natural selection show that, instead of making decisions in a RCT-like way, we rely on „simple heuristics‟ – basic rules that make for quick, but often still quite accurate decisions. However, as I try to make clearer in this paper, their arguments turn out to be unconvincing: evidentially, they suffer from the fact that we are lacking crucial information about our past, and methodologically, they suffer from the fact that they are unable to suggest genuinely novel phenomena or hypotheses to investigate. Since the same problems also befall many other evolutionary arguments in this area, I therefore conclude that the evolutionary perspective has, as yet, contributed little to the debate surrounding the plausibility of RCT. Gigerenzer‟s Evolutionary Arguments against Rational Choice Theory Page 1 Gigerenzer’s Evolutionary Arguments against Rational Choice Theory: