Rethinking Cognitive Biases: An Ecological Perspective on Adaptive Mismatches

The study of cognitive biases has dominated behavioral economics and cognitive psychology for nearly half a century, proposing a view of human cognition as systematically flawed. This chapter presents a fundamental reconceptualization of cognitive biases through the lens of ecological rationality and developmental plasticity. Building on Oeberst and Imhoff's (2023) insight that many biases reflect belief-consistent information processing, we argue that these phenomena may be better understood as instances of adaptive mismatch—situations where cognitive strategies that were adaptive in their original environmental context produce suboptimal results when applied in novel environments. Rather than viewing these mismatches as products of fixed, evolutionarily-designed modules, we propose that they emerge from the flexible reassembly of basic cognitive capabilities through cultural learning processes, as suggested by the cognitive gadgets approach. This framework integrates several theoretical perspectives: the reconceptualization of decision-making as continuous environmental navigation rather than discrete choice; understanding cognitive strategies as ecologically rational adaptations to environmental structure; viewing mismatches as informative signals within a vector field of potential adaptations; and analyzing heuristics through the lens of predictive processing. We provide concrete examples from empirical research that demonstrate how seemingly irrational behaviors can be understood as adaptive responses to specific environmental structures. Our synthesis offers a theoretical integration across multiple research traditions while suggesting new approaches to research methodology and policy intervention. This ecological perspective not only provides a more nuanced account of why cognitive "biases" persist but also suggests more effective approaches to education, decision support, and public policy that work with, rather than against, the ecological design of human cognition.