In my PhD dissertation, I substantiated the view that the human mind shows clear minimalist characteristics, striving to achieve its goal without any redundancy in terms of cognitive resources. That is, metaphorically, the mind strives to take the shortest possible path en route to its goal, where the term shortest indicates the redundancy-free condition alluded to above (with time being the resource of interest here), and the term possible highlights the constraints imposed by the computational machinery of the mind (i.e., cognitive architecture).
“Because nature is always able [to accomplish something] through rather simple means, it doesn’t act through difficult winding paths.” — Kepler (1609/1858)
This page is meant to provide a (non-exhaustive) list of behaviors/findings which support this view:
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- The Frame Problem (Nobandegani, 2017, § 3)
- Overimitation in childhood (Nobandegani, 2017, § 4)
- Human intervention strategies (Nobandegani, 2017, § 4)
- Human independence judgement (Nobandegani, § 5)
- Recognition and imagery (Nobandegani, 2017, § 6)
- The Availability bias (Nobandegani et al., 2018)
- The fourfold pattern of risk preferences in outcome probability and magnitude (Nobandegani et al., 2018)
- Effects of time pressure and processing speed on risk preferences (da Silva Castanheira, Nobandegani, & Otto, 2019)
- The Allais, St. Petersburg, and Ellsberg paradoxes (Nobandegani & Shultz, 2020; Nobandegani, Shultz, & Dubé, 2021)
- Cooperation in Prisoner’s Dilemma (Nobandegani et al., 2019)
- Inequality-aversion in the Ultimatum Game (Nobandegani, Destais, & Shultz, 2020)
- Human coordination strategies (Nobandegani & Shultz, 2020)
- Violation of betweenness (Nobandegani et al., 2019)
- The principle of least effort
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Ardavan S. Nobandegani 