What is Error Management Theory?
In the human evolutionary past, we had to deal with hidden dangers. The situation could be one where, for example, a group of early humans were spending the night in a cave and before leaving in the morning one of them heard a rustling in the bushes near to the entrance. In this situation there are four possibilities; • there is a predator lying in wait at the entrance to the cave and the cave-dwellers choose to stay in the cave fearing the unseen predator • there is a predator lying in wait at the entrance to the cave and the cave-dwellers do not think that there is a predator there and exit the cave • there is no predator and the cave-dwellers choose to stay in the cave fearing the unseen predator • there is no predator and the cave-dwellers do not think that there is a predator there and exit the cave In the scenarios described in point 1 and point 4 are successes. We are not interested in the successes but we are interested in the errors, more specifically, the relative cost of the
