The Cognitive-Ecological Approach to Rationality in Social Psychology

Social Cognition, Vol. 27, Issue 5, pg. 699-732

Klaus Fiedler and Michaela Wänke

The entire discipline of social cognition has been greatly influenced by the heuristics-and-biases research program, which was traditionally based on an internal attribution of bounded rationality to the individual's motives and resource limitations. The cognitive-ecological approach challenges this fundamental attribution bias in the researchers' mind, offering alternative accounts for a long list of allegedly cognitive biases and shortcomings in terms of external, environmental sampling biases. In addition to suggesting reattributions for old findings, the cognitive-ecological approach has inspired the discovery of novel phenomena, such as interactive sampling schemes, communication biases, multi-level problems, and ecological properties that constrain the input to cognitive processes. While this reattribution offers excuses for the mind's apparent biases, it also entails an accusation for the meta-cognitive myopia that prevents the mind from understanding the pitfalls of the information environment. Thus, rather than taking either a cynically pessimistic or a naively optimistic side in the rationality debate, the cognitive-ecological approach emphasizes the fascinating interactions of cognitive and ecological constraints of information processing.