P. Hammerstein and J. R. Stevens: ‘Evolution and the Mechanisms of Decision Making’

Abstract

There is no doubt that the study of decision making is one of the central problems of contemporary natural and social science. However, despite the importance of this problem and the effort that has gone into resolving it, there is still much that is not well understood about how and why humans (and other animals) make the decisions that they do. Hammerstein and Stevens’s new collection of essays is set to change this: by putting together new work by some of the key researchers in the area, it marks a significant advance in the state of this debate. In what follows, I first lay out the key aspects of the structure and content of the book in Sect. 2. After that, in Sect. 3, I remark on one positive and one negative feature of the general setup of the collection. I conclude in Sect. 4.