Thread by @RoopeKaaronen

Do you like shrooms? 🍄 If yes, read on (thread):

My paper Mycological Rationality was published in Judgment and Decision Making.

How do #mushroom foragers make safe decisions? I study decision-making, heuristics & perception with 894 Finnish foragers.

journal.sjdm.org/20/200330/jdm2…

Some context for this study: Lots of decision-making research is very abstract, and there's actually relatively little research on decision-making "in the wild".

Turns out mushroom foraging is quite an interesting case for studying decision-making and its cultural evolution.

This is not the least because even one mistake when foraging may kill you. Deadly species are abundant, and edible species can have poisonous lookalikes.

E.g., Amanita virosa, the "destroying angel" (below), can look similar to champignons and grows abundantly in Finland.

Naturally then, mushroom foraging happens under great *uncertainty*. Research in ecological rationality has suggested that in such environments, people can often resort to relatively simple ("fast and frugal") heuristics. My study gives some flesh to these claims (with caveats).

The foragers I studied reported using several such heuristics. Some infer edibility from "white milk" that bleeds from milk-caps (Lactarius, below); others totally avoid all white mushrooms (because of A. virosa, above). Foragers also associate specific trees with mushrooms.

Better safe than sorry: Foragers seem to *avoid taking calculated risks*, and instead Finnish foraging cultures have evolved heuristic precautionary principles to put strict bounds on uncertainty (e.g., "don't pick ANY unrecognised mushrooms"). Very practical risk management.

But heuristics alone don't always suffice. The study also illustrates how many foragers use intuitive pattern recognition and more complex cognitive rules in tandem with simple heuristics, and includes various thoughts on the development of selective perception.

There's plenty to speculate here re. the cultural evolution of foraging societies. When and how did these precautionary heuristics evolve? I can date some to at least 1863. Do other foraging societies (or did early hunter-gatherers) use heuristics similarly?

Some foragers also reported rather... *ahem*... unique, mnemonics to aid in decision-making (picture of C. caperatus for reference):

All in all, I think it made for a fun study on decision-making in the fuzzy and uncertain real-world. And foragers were such a fun group to engage with! You'll find my earlier writings on the topic here for @TheSideViewCo:

thesideview.co/journal/the-ar…

I find this line of research quite promising. It’s specifically the kind of cultural, human-scale research on cognition and perception I enjoy the most.

Also, lots of shroom photos in the article (it's a new hobby of mine).

Happy to hear your thoughts, as always!

Finally, a little plug for the journal: JDM is an Open Access journal with no publishing fees. As if that's not enough, this was the most constructive editorial/review process I've been through. Big thanks to editor Jon Baron and reviewers. Full issue:

journal.sjdm.org/vol15.5.html