Variation in Decision Making

Abstract

Variation in how organisms allocate their behavior over their lifetimes is key to determining Darwinian fi tness, and thus the evolution of human and nonhuman decision making. This chapter explores how decision making varies across biologically and societally signifi cant scales and what role such variation plays when trying to understand decision making from an evolutionary perspective. The importance of explicitly considering variation is highlighted, both when attempting to predict economically and socially important patterns of behavior and to obtain a deeper understanding of the fundamental biological processes involved. Key elements of a framework are identifi ed for incorporating variation into a general theory of Darwinian decision making.