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What is seen and what is not seen in the economy: An effect of our evolved psychology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 August 2018

Pascal Boyer  and
Michael Bang Petersen
Pascal Boyer
Affiliation:
Departments of Psychology and Anthropology, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO 63130. pboyer@wustl.eduwww.pascalboyer.net
Michael Bang Petersen
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science and Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, Aarhus University, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark. michael@ps.au.dkhttp://au.dk/en/michael@ps
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Abstract

Specific features of our evolved cognitive architecture explain why some aspects of the economy are “seen” and others are “not seen.” Drawing from the commentaries of economists, psychologists, and other social scientists on our original proposal, we propose a more precise model of the acquisition and spread of folk-beliefs about the economy. In particular, we try to provide a clearer delimitation of the field of folk-economic beliefs (sect. R2) and to dispel possible misunderstandings of the role of variation in evolutionary psychology (sect. R3). We also comment on the difficulty of explaining folk-economic beliefs in terms of domain-general processes or biases (sect. R4), as developmental studies show how encounters with specific environments calibrate domain-specific systems (sect. R5). We offer a more detailed description of the connections between economic beliefs and political psychology (sect. R6) and of the probable causes of individual variation in that domain (sect. R7). Taken together, these arguments point to a better integration or consilience between economics and human evolution (sect. R8).

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Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 41 , 2018 , e191
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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