Why heuristics work

ABSTRACT—The adaptive toolbox is a Darwinian-inspired theory that conceives of the mind as a modular system that is composed of heuristics, their building blocks, and evolved capacities. The study of the adaptive toolbox is descriptive and analyzes the selection and structure of heuristics in social and physical environments. The study of ecological rationality is prescriptive and identifies the structure of environments in which specific heuristics either succeed or fail. Results have been used for designing heuristics and environments to improve professional decision making in the real world. Logic, probability, and heuristics are three central ideas in the intellectual history of the mind. For Aristotle, logic was a theory of ideal human reasoning and inference. Probability theory emerged only late in the mid-17th century, replacing logica