December
4 Martie Haselton, UCLA
Communications
Biases in Social
Cognition: Design Flaws or Design Features?
Error
Management Theory (EMT) proposes that psychological mechanisms will be
predictably biased when the ancestral costs of false-positive and false-negative
errors were asymmetrical over evolutionary history. This theory can
explain men’s over-perception of women’s sexual intent, and it predicts
a new bias in mind-reading in which women underestimate men’s commitment.
I will discuss several studies in which I have documented these predicted
effects. I will also present a study in which I documented
the “sister effect,” a condition in which men’s sexual over-perception
bias is corrected. In addition to predicting new effects, EMT helps
to explain many previously documented biases in humans and non-human animals.
I will discuss several of these phenomena and then conclude by contrasting
EMT with the heuristics-and-biases approach to understanding cognitive
biases.