Daniel Blumstein
is Chair of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UCLA
Biology Editor
Daniel Blumstein is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UCLA, and a Professor in UCLA's Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. He received his PhD at UC Davis in animal behavior, and had postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Marburg (Germany), The University of Kansas, and Macquarie University (Australia). He is a behavioral ecologist broadly interested in the evolution of behavior and the application of behavioral and evolutionary principles to policy, health, and defense. He has studied the behavior and ecology of mammals (including humans), birds, fish, lizards, hermit crabs, and sea anenome and runs the 50+ year project studying the behavioral and evolutionary ecology of yellow-bellied marmots at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Gothic, Colorado. The author of over 200 scholarly works and five books, his most recent books include: "A Primer of Conservation Behavior" (Sinauer Associates, 2010, with Esteban Fernandez-Juricic), "The Failure of Environmental Education (And How We Can Fix It)" (University of California Press, 2011, with Charles Saylan), and "Eating Our Way to Civility: A Dinner Party Guide" (a Kindle and Apple e-book, 2011).
Authored by
Daniel Blumstein
September 11, 2013
Making The Right Mistakes: Error Management And The Evolution Of Errors
An evolutionary perspective on psychological biases tells a very different story about decision making.If we have learned anything from recent years in the behavioral sciences, it is that humans have numerous but systematic psychological biases that steer our judgment and decision-making away from what one might expect if we were even-handed in weighing up costs, benefits and probabilities.
