Adaptive toolbox

Adaptive toolbox is the term used to describe the collection of specialised cognitive mechanisms that evolution has built into the human mind for specific domains of inference and reasoning, including decision-making heuristics. The heuristics, mental shortcuts, approximations or rules-of-thumb, used singly and in combination to produce higher order mental processes can be organised in our mind’s adaptive toolbox in a number of ways. This organisational structure also determines how the heuristics are accessed. Heuristics in our adaptive toolbox can be classified by type of decision task being faced, or according to the adaptive problem that needs to be solved. Our adaptive toolbox develops over time for use in specific situations: the heuristics and decision- making strategies our adaptive toolbox contains are domain, or context, specific. Our adaptive toolbox may be developed into a repertoire of different decision-making strategies that are used in different ways according to the conditions (Gigerenzer et al. 1999: 30-32; 94; 141; 357). Also see heuristics and schema.