Meliorating the Suboptimal-Choice Argument

Abstract

Zentall’s (2019) target article, “What suboptimal choice tells us about the control of behavior,” is in three parts. The first part reviews a set of studies that have yielded surprising findings: In relatively simple choice tasks, animals seem to behave irrationally by making suboptimal choices. The second part introduces a set of hypotheses to account for the surprising findings: Animals may behave according to a variety of heuristics that are adaptive in their natural environments but maladaptive in the contrived laboratory settings. The third part explains what suboptimal choice in fact tells us about the control of behavior. In this commentary we argue that Part 1 is timely, interesting, and important; that Part 2, potentially the article’s greatest contribution, includes imaginative, testable hypotheses alongside conceptually confused and even inconsistent hypotheses; and that Part 3 may be too vague to be useful. We conclude with some general remarks on the nature of the problems brought to our attention by the target article. Part 1. Suboptimal Choice as a Subset of Surprising Research Findings