Homo Effectivus: Toward a Unified Model of Human Cognition for the Study of Social-ecological Systems

Abstract

"Institutional economics and related fields are struggling to reconcile their inherited assumptions about human rationality with the heterogeneous behaviours that are observed in both experimental and real-world conditions. This begs the question: what set of assumptions should we bring to the study of our own species’ role in complex systems? In response, we propose HOMO EFFECTIVUS: a model of human cognition, synthesized from various literatures, in which our propensity for mental efficiency, achieved mainly through analogical--or case-based--reasoning, is the primary assumption. This assumption can, in turn, directly inform how we select future objects of analysis."