Making Decisions

It would be easy to ascribe these tendencies to a simple quirk of evolution—a kind of mental tic encoded in our genes. But what if the cognitive biases we exhibit when making choices are not limited to us? What if these biases are basic emergent properties of any system forced to make decisions with limited mental resources?

In order to get inside the “black box” of humanity’s irrationality when deciding between many options, researchers created a simplified mathematical model of how a machine—an “automaton”—would make choices.