Ecological Rationality Research Articles

The Impact of Cognitive Distortions on Decision Making in Agile Project Management Frameworks: Current Positions and Perspectives in the Academic Community

The purpose of the study is to review the current positions and views of the scientific community regarding the influence of cognitive distortions (both individual and group) on decision-making within such an approach to project management as agile framework. The article defines the concepts of “project”, “project management”, “agile project management framework”, “heuristics”, “cognitive distortions”; it describes what kind of decisions (according to the hierarchical structure) can be made when using agile project management frameworks. On the basis of analysis of a number of scientific works, the existence of the problem of success (efficiency) of implemented (including IT) projects even if modern flexible frameworks of project management are used is fixed. The author of the study considers the concept of heuristics and cognitive distortions (both individual and group), describes the manifestation of individual and group cognitive biases, gives examples of individual and group cognitive biases’ impact to decisions taken in Agile project management. As a result, the author proposes a classification of likely to manifest individual and group cognitive biases at each of the three levels of decision-making in Agile (according to the hierarchical structure): operational decisions, tactical decisions, strategic decisions. The author also provides an overview of the development of decision-making theory and describes three main approaches to the consideration of the empirical decision-making process: according to D. Kahneman and A. Tversky (heuristic approach; behavioral economics), according to G. Gigerenzer (ecological rationality approach), according to G. Klein (naturalistic approach). The author also identifies a possible further vector for the development of research in this direction. The result of the work was the classification of probable individual and group cognitive distortions at each of the three levels of decision-making in flexible project management frameworks (according to the hierarchical structure): operational, tactical, and strategic.

Naturalizing relevance realization: why agency and cognition are fundamentally not computational.

The way organismic agents come to know the world, and the way algorithms solve problems, are fundamentally different. The most sensible course of action for an organism does not simply follow from logical rules of inference. Before it can even use such rules, the organism must tackle the problem of relevance. It must turn ill-defined problems into well-defined ones, turn semantics into syntax. This ability to realize relevance is present in all organisms, from bacteria to humans. It lies at the root of organismic agency, cognition, and consciousness, arising from the particular autopoietic, anticipatory, and adaptive organization of living beings. In this article, we show that the process of relevance realization is beyond formalization. It cannot be captured completely by algorithmic approaches. This implies that organismic agency (and hence cognition as well as consciousness) are at heart not computational in nature. Instead, we show how the process of relevance is realized by an adaptive and emergent triadic dialectic (a trialectic), which manifests as a metabolic and ecological-evolutionary co-constructive dynamic. This results in a meliorative process that enables an agent to continuously keep a grip on its arena, its reality. To be alive means to make sense of one's world. This kind of embodied ecological rationality is a fundamental aspect of life, and a key characteristic that sets it apart from non-living matter.

Driving mechanism for farmers to adopt agroecology for biodiversity conservation: Inspiration from tea management in a China National Park

Abstract Conflicts arising from human activities and biodiversity value affect the conservation efficacy of protected areas. Resolving these conflicts requires conservation‐compatible livelihoods, such as through agroecology. Here, we built a comprehensive social–psychological framework to explore and understand farmers' intentions to adopt agroecological approaches in tea management in Wuyishan National Park, China. We extended the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) by integrating household livelihood assets (LAs) as a material precondition for the social–psychological decision‐making process. We proposed geographical location (GL) and livelihood strategy (LS) as moderating factors for this agroecology intention. We collected 369 valid household samples through structured interviews. We then used partial least square‐structural equation (PLS‐SEM) modelling to explore the determinants that affect tea farmers' agroecological intentions. Livelihood assets were a material foundation influencing the intention to adopt agroecology and were also mediated by three psychological constructs to take effect. Perceived behavioural control explained the largest proportion of the variance for intention and exerted the most significant mediation effects. Subjective norm was another vital independent predictor and exerted a positive influence on both perceived behavioural control and attitude. The direct and mediating impacts of attitude on the intention were weaker but showed that farmers' ecological rationality outweighed value rationality. Livelihood strategies measured by operational scale and livelihood diversity were able to moderate farmers' psychology. Subjective norm had positively significant influence on perceived behavioural control and attitude, indicating that social support to farmers enhanced their feeling of control over adopting agroecology and that important referent groups as sources of information helped farmers' attitude formation. Perceived behavioural control positively and significantly influences farmers' attitudes as well. Synthesis and applications. Our findings provide evidence of the necessity to optimise rural farmers' livelihood assets to enhance their confidence and control over agroecology. Resolving the conservation‐development dilemma in protected areas through agroecology should aim at comprehensive support that respects bioculture and improves farmers' ability. We suggest knowledge co‐production of traditional wisdom and modern technologies, reducing management costs and risks, strengthening park‐people communication and diversifying incentives to farmers with different livelihood strategies.

Economics from a biological perspective: the role of sociocultural homeostasis

ABSTRACT Economics and biology have long been overlapping and mutually enriching fields. We contribute to this cross-fertilization by spelling out the implications for economic theory of some recent insights from evolutionary neurobiology. We note that dynamic homeostasis, a core feature of life processes, has shaped social interactions at varied stages of evolution – from the patterns of competition and cooperation among early life forms to the complex process of human cultures. The resulting homeostatic perspective is not compatible with several leading economic theories but does provide a biological footing for promising concepts such as ecological rationality, heuristics, heterogeneity of economic agents, and complex, self-organizing dynamics.

Inconsistencies in rater-based assessments mainly affect borderline candidates: but using simple heuristics might improve pass-fail decisions.

Research in various areas indicates that expert judgment can be highly inconsistent. However, expert judgment is indispensable in many contexts. In medical education, experts often function as examiners in rater-based assessments. Here, disagreement between examiners can have far-reaching consequences. The literature suggests that inconsistencies in ratings depend on the level of performance a to-be-evaluated candidate shows. This possibility has not been addressed deliberately and with appropriate statistical methods. By adopting the theoretical lens of ecological rationality, we evaluate if easily implementable strategies can enhance decision making in real-world assessment contexts. We address two objectives. First, we investigate the dependence of rater-consistency on performance levels. We recorded videos of mock-exams and had examiners (N=10) evaluate four students' performances and compare inconsistencies in performance ratings between examiner-pairs using a bootstrapping procedure. Our second objective is to provide an approach that aids decision making by implementing simple heuristics. We found that discrepancies were largely a function of the level of performance the candidates showed. Lower performances were rated more inconsistently than excellent performances. Furthermore, our analyses indicated that the use of simple heuristics might improve decisions in examiner pairs. Inconsistencies in performance judgments continue to be a matter of concern, and we provide empirical evidence for them to be related to candidate performance. We discuss implications for research and the advantages of adopting the perspective of ecological rationality. We point to directions both for further research and for development of assessment practices.

Intuiciones y racionalidad ecológica

Through an ecological approach, it can be said that a person tries to identify the optimal action for him- or herself by a set of different possible actions through intuition. The debate about the ‘dual process theories’ takes up this idea and postulates two different ways to evaluate decision possibilities: A logical-analytical path and an intuitive (Magrabi and Bach, 2013). Predominantly, it is assumed that the logical-analytical path is related to rationality and therefore the path to strive for in rational decision-making. However, in science it has been shown that bounded rationality is to be assumed. Therefore, the question of the extent to which emotions or feelings, and in this context also intuitions, are rational has come to the fore (De Sousa, 1987; Evans and Cruse, 2004). In this paper, intuitions are considered as a feeling with intentionality: Intuitions always refer to an appropriate environment and are directed toward a decision that results in an action. With Damásio (1994, 2013) it can be shown that an intuition is a feeling that excels in acting as a cue or signal. With the assumption of an ecological rationality (Gigerenzer, Todd and ABC Research Group, 1999; Todd and Gigerenzer, 2012; Todd and Brighton, 2016), it can be shown that intuitive decisions are based on experiential knowledge and implicit structure recognition (Magrabi and Bach, 2013). Accordingly, with the approach of an ecological rationality it can be shown that an intuitive decision is rational in the sense that a person interacts quickly and energy-efficiently successfully adapted with his or her environment and thereby identifies the individual optimal action for him- or herself. This may then be recognized as a ‘gut feeling’ or ‘intuition’. Two challenges will be outlined explained in this paper: The influence of a negative environment on intuitive decisions, and the confusion of an intuition with an emotion or other feeling.

A qualitative study exploring the epistemology of suffering within a Malaysian Indigenous tribe.

Despite the universal nature of suffering, few studies have examined how Indigenous ethnic minorities in non-western regions understand and respond to adversity. This study explored the epistemology of suffering among the Temiar ethnic group of Peninsular Malaysia using participant observation and semi-structured interviews. Interview transcripts of 43 participants were coded through inductive thematic analysis and a consensual qualitative approach. Three-tier themes were defined and named after subsequent analysis of core ideas and domains in the data. Major adversities reported included a lack of basic needs, lack of land-rights and unjust treatment from authorities, destruction of the forest environment and livelihood, and lack of accessibility and facilities, which were attributed to authorities' negligence of responsibilities, increasing human-animal conflict, environmental threats and imposed lifestyle changes. Faced with adversity, the Temiar endeavoured to survive by working crops and gathering forest resources. They utilized resources from family, fellow villagers, external agencies and spiritual-religious traditions. Theoretical mapping of attribution styles into the Ecological Rationality Framework revealed predominantly external-focused and concrete-perceptual rationalities privileged by strong-ties societies. These findings pointed to the resilience of a strong-ties community while adapting to the systemic suffering and risk factors stemming from a rationality mismatch with modernization and globalization trends. To conclude, we advocate for culture-sensitive mental health and psychiatric practices, as well as sustainable development for the well-being of Indigenous communities locally and globally.

STUDIES OF OILCONTAMINATED SOILS AND FORWARDLOOKING APPROACHES TO THEIR REMEDIATION

Milestones in the study of oilcontaminated soils at the Faculty of Soil Science for 50 years of its foundation are discussed from the prospects for the development of environmental regulation and new technologies of soil reclamation. The development of a methodological framework for the determination of oil and petroleum hydrocarbons in soils, studies of soil properties, the chemistry of oil and its components in soil and adjacent media are shown. The development of legislation on the rationing of petroleum hydrocarbons in soils is given, including the important role of the staff of Faculty of Soil Science of Moscow State University in the work out of a number of regional standards for the permissible residual content of petroleum hydrocarbons in soils is noted. The approaches to ecological rationing of oil and petroleum hydrocarbons in soils are proposed, in the aspects of natural climatic zones and the type of landuse. The importance of improving the regulatory and methodological framework and continuing work in this direction is emphasized. The necessity of research at developing technologies for reclamation of oilcontaminated lands and special use of oilcontaminated waste is indicated.

Political expertise, ecological rationality and party cues

Abstract Political scientists have proposed that party cues can be used to compensate for the public's well-documented lack of substantive political knowledge, but some critics have argued that applying party cues is more difficult than assumed. We argue that this debate has proven intractable in part because scholars have used ambiguous normative criteria to evaluate judgments. We use a unique task and clear normative criteria to evaluate the use of party cues in making political judgments among two samples: a sample of state legislators and an online sample of the public. We find that the public sample performs poorly when using cues to make judgments. State legislators make much more accurate judgments on average than even the most attentive segment of the public and are more likely to place less weight on irrelevant cues when making judgments, although there is evidence that both samples performed worse with the inclusion of non-diagnostic cues. We conclude with a discussion of the relevance of the results, which we interpret as showing that party cue use is more difficult than theorized, and discuss some practical implications of the findings.

The Influence of Farmers’ Cognition on Forest Land Transfer Behavior: A Case Study of Chengdu City

In the context of China’s forest rights reform, promoting forest land circulation is the key to revitalizing forest land resources and promoting the development of the forestry industry. Based on the theoretical analysis of the effect of farmers’ cognition on forest land transfer behavior, data from 790 farmers in typical areas of Chengdu were used for empirical testing with the binary logit model. At the same time, the effects of the cognitive differences of the farmers with different education levels on forest land circulation are discussed. Finally, appropriate instrumental variables were selected to modify the model, and the IV probit model was used to test the endogeneity of the model. The results showed that the (1) farmers’ cognition had a significant positive effect on the forest land transfer behavior. Among them, in the order of the degree of impact, were the following: ecological cognition, policy cognition, risk cognition, social regulation, and benefit cognition. (2) Among the groups with different education levels, farmers with lower education levels will consider more aspects than farmers with higher education levels when choosing to transfer forest land. By broadening the research into the cognitive composition of farmers, this study deepens our understanding of the influence of farmers’ cognition on forest land transfer behavior. Moreover, it is found that Chinese farmers have strong ecological rationality in addition to economic rationality, and ecological cognition plays a greater role in forest land transfer behavior than benefit cognition, which is of considerable significance for further research on forest land transfer behavior.

Fast-and-frugal heuristics: an exploration into building an adaptive toolbox to assess the uncertainty of rework

Performing rework within the production system of construction is the most expensive waste that confronts organisations, with its causation yet to be fully understood in practice. Any effort to assess the risk of rework poses challenges due to limited information about its frequency and causes, rendering the use of statistical models immeasurable. Research has shown that fast-and-frugal heuristics enable epistemic success under conditions of uncertainty and cognitive complexity – they are accurate, fast, and rely on limited information. Thus, this paper proposes the following research question: How can fast-and-frugal heuristics effectively assess the uncertainty of rework in construction? The theoretical framing of ecological rationality provides an environmental structure for bounded rationality to explore this question, enabling a person’s ‘adaptive toolbox’ of fast-and-frugal heuristics tailored for different epistemic and pragmatic decisions to be utilised. Situations during the construction of a transport infrastructure mega-project (>AU$18 billion) where there was profound uncertainty surrounding rework are presented. The heuristics, intuitively drawn from an individual’s adaptive toolbox used to form judgments to assess the uncertainty of rework, are identified. The theoretical and practical implications of the paper are discussed before presenting suggestions for future research to help build a robust adaptive toolbox to be utilised for assessing the uncertainty of rework in construction.

Back to the Future: Toward a Hybrid Architecture for Ad Hoc Teamwork

State of the art methods for ad hoc teamwork, i.e., for collaboration without prior coordination, often use a long history of prior observations to model the behavior of other agents (or agent types) and to determine the ad hoc agent's behavior. In many practical domains, it is difficult to obtain large training datasets, and necessary to quickly revise the existing models to account for changes in team composition or domain attributes. Our architecture builds on the principles of step-wise refinement and ecological rationality to enable an ad hoc agent to perform non-monotonic logical reasoning with prior commonsense domain knowledge and models learned rapidly from limited examples to predict the behavior of other agents. In the simulated multiagent collaboration domain Fort Attack, we experimentally demonstrate that our architecture enables an ad hoc agent to adapt to changes in the behavior of other agents, and provides enhanced transparency and better performance than a state of the art data-driven baseline.

Editorial: Toyota Production System practices asFast‐and‐Frugalheuristics

Editorial: Toyota Production System practices as<scp>Fast‐and‐Frugal</scp>heuristics

The Choice of Indicators for Ecological Rationing of Petroleum Products in Chestnut Soils

The Choice of Indicators for Ecological Rationing of Petroleum Products in Chestnut Soils

The Heuristics and Biases of Top Managers: Past, Present, and Future

AbstractPsychology‐grounded research on heuristics and biases in decision making has become increasingly influential in the field of management studies. However, although this line of inquiry is recognized as a valuable perspective for advancing understanding of decision processes in the upper echelons of firms, extant research remains unbalanced, the bulk of previous endeavours having been focused on managerial overconfidence, with insights from more recent dual‐process theory and ecological rationality conceptions of heuristics less explored. This introductory article to the special issue of the Journal of Management Studies, entitled ‘the heuristics and biases of top managers: Past, present, and future’, offers a reflective review of prior work addressing its focal theme and places the articles incorporated into the special issue within this broader context. In addition, it sets out a number of directions for future work, with a view to inspiring the continuing advancement of conceptual and empirical knowledge and management practice.

Opaque decision-making in organizations

PurposeMany decision rules are rational but opaque, and many others are irrational but transparent. This paper aims to propose a theoretical framework to operationalize opacity in decision-making – the degree to which a decision rule is intelligible to the decision maker.Design/methodology/approachThe authors operationalize opacity and discuss the implication of opaque decision-making in organizational settings through a typology, where decision rules can be rational or irrational and opaque or transparent.FindingsThe authors show that opacity is asymmetric as different organizational actors possess different degrees of knowledge about how the decision rules work. Organizational actors often opacify the decision rules to increase their power (based on asymmetric knowledge). Opacity also presents a significant impact on organizational accountability, as transparent organizations are more reputable.Originality/valueThis contribution represents the first theoretical and methodological articulation of opacity in decision-making, within a bounded and ecological rationality framework; it also sheds new light on the role of cognitive biases in organizational settings.

Ecological rationality and economics: where the Twain shall meet

Over the past decades psychological theories have made significant headway into economics, culminating in the 2002 (partially) and 2017 Nobel prizes awarded for work in the field of Behavioral Economics. Many of the insights imported from psychology into economics share a common trait: the presumption that decision makers use shortcuts that lead to deviations from rational behaviour (the Heuristics-and-Biases program). Many economists seem unaware that this viewpoint has long been contested in cognitive psychology. Proponents of an alternative program (the Ecological-Rationality program) argue that heuristics need not be irrational, particularly when judged relative to characteristics of the environment. We sketch out the historical context of the antagonism between these two research programs and then review more recent work in the Ecological-Rationality tradition. While the heuristics-and-biases program is now well-established in (mainstream neo-classical) economics via Behavioral Economics, we show there is considerable scope for the Ecological-Rationality program to interact with economics. In fact, we argue that there are many existing, yet overlooked, bridges between the two, based on independently derived research in economics that can be construed as being aligned with the tradition of the Ecological-Rationality program. We close the paper with a discussion of the open challenges and difficulties of integrating the Ecological Rationality program with economics.

Bounded Rationality a Prelude to Ecological Rationality: A Deeper Look at the Fast and Frugal Heuristic in Leadership

&#x0D; This article examines literature that shows why the fast and frugal heuristic is an appropriate decision-making approach for leaders. Unlike traditional decision-making methods, the fast and frugal heuristic uses mental shortcuts and systematic reasoning when there are time constraints and a lack of information available. In general, whether a leader elects to use the fast and frugal heuristic depends on their mental model, a compilation of experiences and perceptions that influence how individuals make decisions. The fast and frugal heuristic approach, ingrained in the ecological rationality theoretical framework, specifies that leaders adapt how they make decisions based on the context and complexity of the environment (Goldstein &amp; Gigerenzer, 2002). Leaders face multi-faceted challenges and the agility to employ the fast and frugal heuristics fosters greater cognitive flexibility, holistic thinking (Hallo &amp; Nguyen, 2022), and more robust leadership and problem-solving abilities. &#x0D;

“Confronting time out of joint. . . – On economic rationality and imagination”

It is often suggested that today we are living in the “end times.” Confronted by a perpetual incursion of major global crises, we increasingly find ourselves incapable of meaningfully relating to the present, let alone to the future. The forever deferred “end” throws the very idea of time out of joint. Unable to advance, our imagination retreats, with retrograde tendencies taking over both culture and politics. From incessant movie prequels and sequels, through the re-emergence of populist fascist politics, all the way to the return of Cold War rhetoric, we witness our reality becoming increasingly substituted by a string of peculiar rehashings and reunions. History, as we knew it, is no longer “made”; we strain to cling to the past, equating the future with dystopia. Crucially, this problematique of the fading of temporality is not new. In fact, it has got a history of its own. This paper explores our current (a)temporal whereabouts by reflecting upon them from the perspective of their historical trajectory. It does this by revisiting the work of André Gorz—a thinker whose contributions equip us with the insights needed to confront time out of joint effectively and embrace the idea of future. The article argues that the roots of today’s temporal malaise can be found in the process of “economicization,” which subordinated the notion of utopia to its principles, thereby nullifying it. Examining the effects of the unbridled reign of economic rationality over our imagination, it calls for a temporal intervention by means of ecological rationality.

Can People Use Party Cues to Assess Policymaker Positions? Ecological Rationality and Political Heuristics

Scholars disagree about the ability of people to use heuristics to make political judgments, with some arguing that heuristics are easy-to-use pieces of information and others arguing that applying heuristics may require some degree of political expertise. We argue that these debates have been somewhat intractable because most prior work has not considered the ecological rationality of political judgments—that is, the potential for cues to yield accurate judgments about a clearly defined reference class. In this paper, we present the results of two studies exploring whether people use party labels to make judgments about a random sample of U.S. Representatives’ voting behaviors. We find that respondents consistently performed worse in guessing U.S. Representatives’ votes than if they had correctly used a simple partisan heuristic. There is also some evidence that people performed worse with the presence of more nonparty cues. Attention to politics had a positive relationship with accuracy in both studies, although the relationship was modest. The results suggest that party cues may be more difficult to apply than some research has suggested.