The evolved architecture of hazard management: Risk detection reasoning and the motivational computation of threat magnitudes
John Tooby, Leda Cosmides · Behavioral and Brain Sciences · 2006
The architecture of the hazard management system underlying precautionary behavior makes functional sense, given the adaptive computational problems it evolved to solve. Many seeming infelicities in its outputs, such as behavior with “apparent lack of rational motivation” or disproportionality, are susceptibilities that derive from the sheer computational difficulty posed by the problem of cost-effectively deploying countermeasures to rare, harmful threats.