Center for Adaptive Rationality
Director: Ralph Hertwig
The Mind's Adaptive Toolbox
Real-World Impact
Asking the Big Questions
Introduction
This is an age of polycrisis: Systemic threats such as environmental destruction, the erosion of democracy, and the spread of misinformation collide and amplify each other, creating radical uncertainty. While it is possible to tally up the odds at the roulette wheel and in actuarial tables, this is not the case when the determinants of an event are too poorly understood for meaningful probabilities or forecasts to be possible. There is no way to calculate the odds that AI will tilt the balance of power too far from human hands, or to forecast when and how irreversible tipping points in Earth's ecosystems will cascade.
Radical uncertainty is not only a systemic phenomenon; it also permeates everyday life. People face radical uncertainty when they fall in love, when they make transformative life decisions, and when they confront a life-threatening medical diagnosis. As individuals and collectives, human beings are challenged by unpredictability on both global and deeply personal scales. The Center for Adaptive Rationality (ARC) examines the cognitive tools that help people cope with and act within this uncertainty. ARC's approach is both descriptive and practical, seeking not only to reveal how people actually make decisions, but also to empower them to navigate risk and uncertainty with greater competence, agency, and autonomy.
The Minds's Adaptive Toolbox
Classic theories of rationality often assume that there is a single best—and, typically, computationally complex—strategy for making a decision, regardless of context or degree of uncertainty. ARC takes a different view.
Heuristics
Inspired by Herbert Simon's notion of bounded rationality and by ARC's own work on ecological rationality, ARC researchers study the adaptive toolbox of simple cognitive tools and processes that meet the demands of real decision problems under realistic cognitive constraints. Rather than focusing on one complex strategy, ARC investigates a wide range of common heuristics and how they fit the statistical structures, goals, and demands of specific decision contexts. Ecological rationality envisions a collaborative relationship between mind and environment: Environmental structures can compensate for limited cognitive resources by enabling simpler strategies without sacrificing accuracy. Understanding this mind–environment fit is key to explaining and predicting human decision-making. In recent years, ARC researchers have focused especially on what is, ironically, a largely neglected class of choices: life's most important decisions. See Heuristics for more.
Learning
Learning—here in the shape of exploration, sampling, and information integration—is a tool in the mind's adaptive toolbox that allows people to gradually discern the probabilistic texture of the world and the pros and cons of the options they face. It can also take the form of deliberate ignorance—whether avoiding untrustworthy news or cultivating a critical, educated selectivity in the face of a flood of information. ARC's work on deliberate ignorance examines epistemic preferences shaped not only by outcome utility but also by the psychological consequences of information that people choose to seek or avoid. See Learning for more.
Collective Intelligence
There is an important social dimension to the mind's adaptive toolbox. Many decisions are made with and through others, and have consequences that go beyond any one individual. Decision-making often involves sharing information, learning from others' behavior and knowledge, and pooling cognitive resources, while also navigating conflict, tension, and competing interests. Understanding the dynamics, opportunities, and pitfalls of collective decision-making and collective intelligence is integral to ARC's study of the adaptive toolbox. See Collective Intelligence for more.
Development
The adaptive toolbox is ever-evolving. Cognitive tools develop and change as internal resources—memory, knowledge, attentional capacities—grow or decline and as external demands shift. ARC aims to unravel how these changes unfold over the lifespan and as a function of experience, and how they shed light on time-honored questions such as the lifespan development of risk and epistemic preferences. See Development for more.
Real-World Impact
ARC deliberately steps into the messy world of policymaking, with the goal of translating research into practical guidance. Members of ARC have contributed to policy papers on the detrimental effects of social media, misinformation and disinformation, the failures and consequences of self-control, and the intricate relationship between digitalization and democracy. ARC researchers design policies in line with boundedly rational cognitive strategies and limited motivational capacities and evaluate their effectiveness, with the goal of safeguarding individual and collective well-being in the face of both uncertainty and highly engineered commercial environments that are primarily designed to serve corporate—and not necessarily citizens'—interests.
Boosting: The Science of Fostering Better Decisions
ARC's work on the mind's adaptive toolbox is both descriptive and practical, aiming to empower people to make decisions that serve their interests. Researchers design and test competence-building "boosts" that foster the sense of self-efficacy and the ability to make informed choices and decisions while preserving agency and promoting autonomy, especially in highly engineered and even manipulative commercial choice environments. See Boosting for more.
Cognition in Online Environments
The online world presents challenges including manipulative design, information overload, and widespread misinformation. ARC seeks to develop an evidence-based understanding of how these environments affect human cognition and to create a roadmap to address them. Our work examines public attitudes toward anti-misinformation interventions, explores digital media’s impact on democracy, and investigates the drivers of growing citizen alienation from democratic systems. See Cognition in Online Environments for more.
Asking the Big Questions
ARC also seeks to answer the meta-scientific questions that shape the foundations and future of decision science and psychology (see Meta Science). ARC researchers examine methodological issues such as how to improve the measurement of key decision-making concepts, such as individuals' political views and time and risk preferences; how to escape conceptual muddle in psychology; and how to advance cognitive science with large language models (LLMs).
ARC's research program recognizes the radical, systemic changes shaping the world, including climate change, the transformation of the information ecology through the internet and AI, aging societies, and the spread of misinformation. These shifts, alongside more personal decisions, generate an avalanche of risks and uncertainties. How do people respond, and how can they successfully cope with it? ARC aims to answer this question by studying the individual and collective mind's adaptive toolbox and adding to the assortment of tools.