Error management theory error management theory emt

Error Management Theory
Error management theory (EMT) deals
with the evolution of how we think, make
decisions, and evaluate uncertain
If you were walking in the woods and heard a sound in the bushes
you might be startled and act on the worst case scenario—such as
the threat of a wild animal—by moving in the opposite direction.
This is evolutionary psychology at work, keeping you safe so you
can survive and reproduce. [Image: Nicholas T,
gZ3zEL, CC BY 2.0, ]
Evolutionary Theories in Psychology
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situations—that is, situations where there's no clear answer how we should behave. (Haselton
& Buss, 2000; Haselton, Nettle, & Andrews, 2005). Consider, for example, walking through the
woods at dusk. You hear a rustle in the leaves on the path in front of you. It could be a snake.
Or, it could just be the wind blowing the leaves. Because you can't really tell why the leaves
rustled, it’s an uncertain situation. The important question then is, what are the costs of errors
in judgment? That is, if you conclude that it’s a dangerous snake so you avoid the leaves, the
costs are minimal (i.e., you simply make a short detour around them). However, if you assume
the leaves are safe and simply walk over them—when in fact it is a dangerous snake—the
decision could cost you your life.
Now, think about our evolutionary history and how generation after generation was
confronted with similar decisions, where one option had low cost but great reward (walking
around the leaves and not getting bitten) and the other had a low reward but high cost (walking
through the leaves and getting bitten). These kinds of choices are called “cost asymmetries.”
If during our evolutionary history we encountered decisions like these generation after
generation, over time an adaptive bias would be created: we would make sure to err in favor
of the least costly (in this case, least dangerous) option (e.g., walking around the leaves). To
put it another way, EMT predicts that whenever uncertain situations present us with a safer
versus more dangerous decision, we will psychologically adapt to prefer choices that minimize
the cost of errors.
EMT is a general evolutionary psychological theory that can be applied to many different
domains of our lives, but a specific example of it is the visual descent illusion . To illustrate: Have
you ever thought it would be no problem to jump off of a ledge, but as soon as you stood up
there, it suddenly looked much higher than you thought? The visual descent illusion (Jackson
& Cormack, 2008) states that people will overestimate the distance when looking down from
a height (compared to looking up) so that people will be especially wary of falling from great
heights—which would result in injury or death. Another example of EMT is the auditory looming
bias : Have you ever noticed how an ambulance seems closer when it's coming toward you,
but suddenly seems far away once it's immediately passed? With the auditory looming bias,
people overestimate how close objects are when the sound is moving toward them compared
to when it is moving away from them. From our evolutionary history, humans learned, "It’s
better to be safe than sorry." Therefore, if we think that a threat is closer to us when it’s moving
toward us (because it seems louder), we will be quicker to act and escape. In this regard, there
may be times we ran away when we didn’t need to (a false alarm), but wasting that time is a