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Risk sensitivity as an evolutionary adaptation
Risk aversion is a common behavior universal to humans and animals alike. Economists have traditionally defined risk preferences by the curvature of the utility function. Psychologists and behavioral economists also make use of concepts such as loss aversion and probability weighting to model risk a...
Autores principales: | , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Nature Publishing Group
2015
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4648446/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25649757 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep08242 |
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author | Hintze, Arend Olson, Randal S. Adami, Christoph Hertwig, Ralph |
author_facet | Hintze, Arend Olson, Randal S. Adami, Christoph Hertwig, Ralph |
author_sort | Hintze, Arend |
collection | PubMed |
description | Risk aversion is a common behavior universal to humans and animals alike. Economists have traditionally defined risk preferences by the curvature of the utility function. Psychologists and behavioral economists also make use of concepts such as loss aversion and probability weighting to model risk aversion. Neurophysiological evidence suggests that loss aversion has its origins in relatively ancient neural circuitries (e.g., ventral striatum). Could there thus be an evolutionary origin to risk aversion? We study this question by evolving strategies that adapt to play the equivalent mean payoff gamble. We hypothesize that risk aversion in this gamble is beneficial as an adaptation to living in small groups, and find that a preference for risk averse strategies only evolves in small populations of less than 1,000 individuals, or in populations segmented into groups of 150 individuals or fewer – numbers thought to be comparable to what humans encountered in the past. We observe that risk aversion only evolves when the gamble is a rare event that has a large impact on the individual's fitness. As such, we suggest that rare, high-risk, high-payoff events such as mating and mate competition could have driven the evolution of risk averse behavior in humans living in small groups. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-4648446 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2015 |
publisher | Nature Publishing Group |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-46484462015-11-23 Risk sensitivity as an evolutionary adaptation Hintze, Arend Olson, Randal S. Adami, Christoph Hertwig, Ralph Sci Rep Article Risk aversion is a common behavior universal to humans and animals alike. Economists have traditionally defined risk preferences by the curvature of the utility function. Psychologists and behavioral economists also make use of concepts such as loss aversion and probability weighting to model risk aversion. Neurophysiological evidence suggests that loss aversion has its origins in relatively ancient neural circuitries (e.g., ventral striatum). Could there thus be an evolutionary origin to risk aversion? We study this question by evolving strategies that adapt to play the equivalent mean payoff gamble. We hypothesize that risk aversion in this gamble is beneficial as an adaptation to living in small groups, and find that a preference for risk averse strategies only evolves in small populations of less than 1,000 individuals, or in populations segmented into groups of 150 individuals or fewer – numbers thought to be comparable to what humans encountered in the past. We observe that risk aversion only evolves when the gamble is a rare event that has a large impact on the individual's fitness. As such, we suggest that rare, high-risk, high-payoff events such as mating and mate competition could have driven the evolution of risk averse behavior in humans living in small groups. Nature Publishing Group 2015-02-04 /pmc/articles/PMC4648446/ /pubmed/25649757 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep08242 Text en Copyright © 2015, Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder in order to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ |
spellingShingle | Article Hintze, Arend Olson, Randal S. Adami, Christoph Hertwig, Ralph Risk sensitivity as an evolutionary adaptation |
title | Risk sensitivity as an evolutionary adaptation |
title_full | Risk sensitivity as an evolutionary adaptation |
title_fullStr | Risk sensitivity as an evolutionary adaptation |
title_full_unstemmed | Risk sensitivity as an evolutionary adaptation |
title_short | Risk sensitivity as an evolutionary adaptation |
title_sort | risk sensitivity as an evolutionary adaptation |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4648446/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25649757 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep08242 |
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