Abstract This chapter explores the possibility that human judgment and decision-making heuristics may have an innate component. It begins by providing a brief review of this heuristic approach, exploring what little is known about the role of experience in the emergence of these biases over the course of human development. It then reviews how a comparative-developmental approach allows us to address directly which aspects of our heuristics are innate, universal, and evolutionarily ancient. It adopts insights from comparative cognition to investigate origins of two classic judgmental biases — loss aversion and reference dependence. It presents evidence that humans and nonhumans exhibit analogous judgmental biases previously thought to be uniquely human, and further argues that these shared behaviours result from a common and possibly innate ancestry. The chapter concludes by postulating that examining the innateness of seemingly maladaptive behaviours such as reference dependence and loss aversion may provide insight into the psychological machinery that drives both accurate and biased decision-making.
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