Comments on “Context, conflict, weights, and identities: Some psychological aspects of decision making” by Eldar Shafir

My job here is to comment on Eldar Shafir’s paper, “Context, conflict, weights, and identities: Some psychological aspects of decision making”. Being an anthropologist interested in the evolution of human behavior, I have little to add to the substance. As a result, any comments I might make be things like, “great paper,” “learned a lot”, etc. I don’t think this kind of commentary would be good value for the FRBB. However, in her invitation to this conference Jane Little asked me to comment on paper, and added “We would hope that you would use this comment as an opportunity to broaden the conversation and address aspects of the topic that seem particularly interesting to you as an anthropologist.” And that’s exactly what I’m going to do.