Goal

Flexible thinking has long been revered as a hallmark of human ingenuity. We exhibit an unprecedented degree of behavioral diversity, which allows us to inhabit over half of earth's landmass, including diverse ecological and social environments. Yet, humans also show a striking preference for 'sticking to what we know.' In a range of empirical and real-world decisions, humans' familiar strategies often occlude –even much more efficient– alternatives. This begs the question, what drives humans to be flexible in some contexts, yet inflexible in others?
Until now, research on flexible thinking has been preoccupied with measuring how well humans switch strategies when we have to. However, this tells us nothing about when and under what contexts humans choose to switch from a familiar strategy in order to find or innovate a better alternative. The goal is to assess flexible decision-making, across diverse cultures (systematically selected) and over the course of development (including adulthood), to explain how our ecological and social contexts shape flexible thinking. This speaks directly to The Foundation's aim to understand the capacities which promote human flourishing, by contextualizing flexible thinking within the environments which mold it.

Opportunity

Flexible thinking is studied in many fields with aims ranging from predicting purchasing decisions to assessing cognitive functioning. Although individual differences are pervasive, the contexts which promote flexibility over inflexibility, or vice versa, are unknown. Here we have an opportunity to challenge the often implicit notion that cognition occurs without context. In environments with little variability and high risk of failure, changing strategies may be maladaptive. However, in dynamic environments –especially when risks are low–flexible thinking could lead to pivotal innovations. Perhaps humans' adaptive success lies in our ability to adjust our flexible thinking in response to our environment.

Roadblocks

Studies on flexible thinking have been dominated by snapshot psychology – data that is collected once, with little to no background information about the persons from whom it was collected. However, our decision-making strategies are shaped by a lifetime of interactions with our ecological and social environments.
The first challenge is collecting longitudinal data in often remote, small-scale societies, which requires extensive cross-discipline collaborations. Another challenge is modifying empirical measures of flexible thinking for use across cultures (ecologically valid, translatable) and age groups. Often this means redesigning experiments that do not require elaborate instruction or reading and math skills.

Breakthroughs Needed

A crucial part of this idea is comparing flexible thinking across humans living in diverse ecological and cultural settings, such as rainforest hunter-gatherers, desert pastoralists, island fishermen, and urban wage earners. Establishing sustainable access to these often remote communities is challenging but certainly not prohibitive.
To contextualize flexible thinking, we should prioritize depth, over breadth of data collection. By choosing to support and foster a small network (less than 10) of long-term cross-cultural research initiatives, we could collect detailed longitudinal empirical data on flexible thinking alongside comprehensive contextual data on communities' ecological and social environments. By focusing on the quality and duration of data, we stand the best chance of deciphering how humans' flexible decision-making is impacted by changes in environmental stability, predictability and harshness.
Designing cross-culturally valid experiments can be tedious, but is a considerably smaller roadblock. Traditional paradigms are often nonsensical outside of industrialized contexts and alternatives are rarely available. In order to meet this challenge, we as scientists must open the dialogue to include local community members and research assistants, who have a unique perspective on methodological constraints that are specific to their community. Another critical step is on-site piloting, prior to launching full-scale data collection.

Key Indicators of Success

At year 3: Long-term collaborations with the network of research sites should be established. Initial measures of flexible thinking should be developed and relevant environmental indicators should be identified.
At year 5: Piloting should result in reliable measures of flexible thinking that work across research sites. Indicators of stability, predictability, and harshness should be clear and verifiable. Data collection should be ready to launch.
At year 10: Data should be fully collected, across all sites, with several data points per participant spanning five years. Analyses should clearly show how flexible thinking is influenced by stability, predictability, and harshness.

Additional Information

Pope et al. 2019; 10.1177/0022022118806581
Gopnik, 2020; 10.1098/rstb.2019.0502
Amir and McAuliffe, 2020; 10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2020.06.006
Neldner et al. 2019; 10.1037/dev0000672
Averbeck 2015; 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004164
Could provide valuable project advice: Daniel Haun, Alyssa Crittenden, Tanya Broesch, Michelle Kline, Mark Nielsen, Bailey House
Could make direct contributions to the project: Sheina Lew-Levy, Dorsa Amir, Helen Davis, Emily Messer, Adam Boyette, Karri Neldner, Roman Stengelin