Humans often represent and reason about unrealized possible actions - the vast infinity of things that were not (or have not yet been) chosen. This capacity is central to the most impressive of human abilities: causal reasoning, planning, linguistic communication, moral judgment, etc. Nevertheless, how do we select possible actions that are worth considering from the infinity of unrealized actions that are better left ignored? We review research across the cognitive sciences, and find that the possible actions considered by default are those that are both likely to occur and generally valuable. We then offer a unified theory of why. We propose that (i) across diverse cognitive tasks, the possible actions we consider are biased towards those of general practical utility, and (ii) a plausible primary function for this mechanism resides in decision making.

中文翻译：

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我们如何知道不该想什么

人类经常代表和推理未实现的可能行为 - 未被（或尚未被）选择的无穷无尽的事物。这种能力是最令人印象深刻的人类能力的核心：因果推理、计划、语言交流、道德判断等。然而，我们如何从最好忽略的无数未实现的行动中选择值得考虑的可能行动？我们回顾了跨认知科学的研究，发现默认情况下考虑的可能行动是那些既可能发生又通常有价值的行动。然后我们提供了一个统一的理论。我们建议 (i) 在不同的认知任务中，我们考虑的可能行为偏向于具有一般实用性的行为，