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The confirmation bias is the tendency to focus on information that confirms our existing beliefs and ignore information that is inconsistent with our expectations. For example, if you think that your professor is not very nice, you notice all of the instances of rude behavior exhibited by the professor while ignoring the countless pleasant interactions he is involved in on a daily basis. Have you ever fallen prey to the confirmation bias, either as the source or target of such bias?
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Evolutionary psychology explores the origins of human behavior and mental processes by framing them within the context of natural selection, a theory famously propounded by Charles Darwin. This field asserts that many behaviors common across human societies — ranging from instinctive fear reactions to complex social interactions — arose as evolutionary adaptations. These adaptations enhanced the survival and reproductive success of our ancestors, thereby becoming embedded in the...
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Updated: Oct 11, 2025

Task Interruption and Resumption Paradigm for Testing the Activation and Pursuit of an Abstract Thinking Goal
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Why Do Individuals Seek Information? A Selectionist Perspective.

Matthias Borgstede1

  • 1Foundations of Education, University of Bamberg, Bamberg, Germany.

Frontiers in Psychology
|December 6, 2021
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Adaptive behavior and reinforcement learning emerge from selection, not an innate drive to seek information. This selectionist approach explains information gain and surprise minimization as natural outcomes of behavioral processes.

Keywords:
Fisher informationbehavioral selectioncovariance based law of effectentropyfree energy principleinformation theorymultilevel model of behavioral selectionnatural selection

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Area of Science:

  • Behavioral Science
  • Computational Neuroscience
  • Evolutionary Biology

Background:

  • Existing theories propose innate information-seeking tendencies explain adaptive behavior and reinforcement learning.
  • These essentialist views do not address why information seeking is advantageous.
  • A gap exists in explaining the fundamental drivers of adaptive learning.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To propose a selectionist account of adaptive behavior that explains information seeking without essentialism.
  • To introduce and utilize the multilevel model of behavioral selection (MLBS) for this purpose.
  • To demonstrate how information gain and surprise minimization arise from selection principles.

Main Methods:

  • Formalizing adaptive behavior using the multilevel model of behavioral selection (MLBS).
  • Linking reinforcement learning to natural selection within a unified mathematical framework.
  • Analyzing information-theoretic consequences of behavioral selection using Fisher information and entropy.

Main Results:

  • The MLBS demonstrates that behavioral selection leads to an average gain in information about reinforcement availability.
  • Behavioral equilibrium is achieved when Fisher information of reinforcement probability is maximized.
  • This process minimizes expected surprise (entropy), reflecting reduced environmental feedback randomness.

Conclusions:

  • Behavioral selection inherently maximizes information about fitness consequences, thereby minimizing average surprise.
  • Information gain and surprise minimization are not first principles but emergent properties of selection.
  • Adaptive behavior can be explained through selection processes, negating the need for innate information-seeking tendencies.