Cognitive and Information Sciences' Mind, Technology, and Society (MTS) Speaker Series presents James Holland Jones, Professor of Environmental Social Sciences at Stanford University.

Dr. Holland Jones will present on "The Evolution of Narrative Decision-Making in Information-Poor and Its Implications for Information-Rich Ecologies".

Description:

"The genus Homo emerged in a particularly climatically volatile period of Earth's recent history. I will suggest that humans evolved an adaptive complex that is specifically aimed at managing uncertainty, where uncertainty is defined as variability in outcomes to decisions in which either outcome probabilities or even the state-space of possible outcomes cannot be fully characterized. Uncertainty arises from nonstationary environments, high task complexity, ambiguous payoffs, or short lifespan relative to task complexity. I suggest that the Plio-Pleistocene environments in which H. sapiens ultimately evolved contained all of these elements, particularly as humans developed socio-technical solutions to the adaptive challenges.

Uncertain choice environments require robust decision strategies that do not rely solely on probabilistic reasoning and, in particular, inference about the moments of distributions. I will suggest that the human capacity for narrative evolved as just such a robust decision tool. Narratives can be conceived as temporal, causal models that relate facts about the world with outcomes of interest. Essential for their role in decision-making under uncertainty, narratives provide a scaffolding that allows decision-makers to bridge highly underdetermined elements of complex causal explanations. I will present the results of an agent-based model for the evolution of narrative that tests two (non-exclusive) hypotheses for the benefits of narrative as a decision-making tool: emergent efficacy and high-fidelity transmission. Results suggest that the fidelity of transmission is essential for the evolution of narratives.

I will conclude with a discussion of coherence as a critical feature of narrative decision-making. The adequacy of a narrative is determined, in large part, by both its internal consistency and external consistency with existing narratives. I suggest that this design feature that permits scaffolding and abductive insight in more information-sparse ecologies can become a bug making people susceptible to apophenia, paranoia, and conspiracism."
 

Students, faculty, and staff are welcome to attend!