Well that comment was a while back so I’ll place a caveat on my response that I could have been thinking of something else.
While I was in grad school one of the papers read (by a professor I took a class with but was not part of that class) was “The Origins of Predictable Behavior” (Ron Heiner, AER circa 1984?). It’s interesting because it was largely a Bayesian analysis. Short summary, humans evolve rules that protect them from big, but often infrequent, risks.
I think the idea here is that social norms then set our priors about certain things that are a bit separate from our personal experience—and so are designed to resist the individual updates on priors because the actual evens are infrequent.
Well that comment was a while back so I’ll place a caveat on my response that I could have been thinking of something else.
While I was in grad school one of the papers read (by a professor I took a class with but was not part of that class) was “The Origins of Predictable Behavior” (Ron Heiner, AER circa 1984?). It’s interesting because it was largely a Bayesian analysis. Short summary, humans evolve rules that protect them from big, but often infrequent, risks.
I think the idea here is that social norms then set our priors about certain things that are a bit separate from our personal experience—and so are designed to resist the individual updates on priors because the actual evens are infrequent.
Interesting! Thanks for replying.