For the past half-century, cognitive and social scientists have struggled with the irrationalities of human choice behavior; people consistently make choices that are logically inconsistent. Is human choice behavior evolutionarily adaptive or is it an inefficient patchwork of competing mechanisms? In this review, I present an interdisciplinary synthesis arguing for a novel interpretation: choice is efficiently irrational. Connecting findings across disciplines suggests that observed choice behavior reflects a precise optimization of the trade-off between the costs of increasing the precision of the choice mechanism and the declining benefits that come as precision increases. Under these constraints, a rationally imprecise strategy emerges that works toward optimal efficiency rather than toward optimal rationality. This approach rationalizes many of the puzzling inconsistencies of human choice behavior, explaining why these inconsistencies arise as an optimizing solution in biological choosers.

在过去的半个世纪里，认知和社会科学家一直在努力解决人类选择行为的非理性问题。人们总是做出逻辑上不一致的选择。人类的选择行为是进化适应性的还是竞争机制的低效拼凑而成？在这篇评论中，我提出了一个跨学科的综合，主张一种新颖的解释：选择实际上是非理性的。将跨学科的研究结果联系起来表明，观察到的选择行为反映了提高选择机制精度的成本与精度提高带来的收益下降之间权衡的精确优化。在这些限制下，出现了一种理性上不精确的策略，它致力于最优效率而不是最优理性。这种方法合理化了人类选择行为中许多令人费解的不一致之处，解释了为什么这些不一致现象作为生物选择器的优化解决方案而出现。