As a research program, ‘bounded rationality’ aims to understand the actual cognitive processes that humans use to arrive at their behavioral repertoire. The assumptions of bounded rationality depart from the traditional assumptions of omniscient, ‘Laplacean Demons’ with unlimited information, time and processing ability, and instead assume that individuals possess fast, frugal algorithms which allow individuals to solve a variety of difficult problems under ecologically realistic circumstances without incurring substantial information-gathering or processing costs. In this paper, we explore three ways in which sociocultural processes produce adaptive (or boundedly rational) algorithms. First, simple imitation or social learning heuristics allow individuals to save the costs of individual learning, experimentation, and search by exploiting the information available in the minds of other individuals. Second, over cultural-evolutionary time scales, these algorithms give rise to complex sets of motivations, decision-processes, rules, cues, and procedures that are adaptive in particular socio-ecologies (yet quite maladaptive in others). Third, cultural and socio-interactional processes can combine to give rise to adaptive group processes that distribute cognition, knowledge, skill and labor (institutions, governing processes, markets, etc.). We argue that these three types of processes form the essential elements in a wide range of human decision-making and behavioral patterns. Consequently, any effort to understand these requires an exploration of how each of these sociocultural processes works.
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