{"pk":24026,"title":"Misfortunes never come singly:  Reflections of the environment in a proverb","subtitle":null,"abstract":"“Misfortunes never come singly” is a saying common in different languages and historical contexts. Could this proverb reflect more than irrational superstitions? We draw from two frameworks, the fast-and-frugal heuristics approach to decision making, and the rational analysis of cognition. The former prompts us to conceptualize the proverb as a simple but smart heuristic that may be adapted to statistical regularities in decision-making environments, and the latter offers a method for studying such environments. Analyzing the pattern of humanitarian disasters between 2000 and 2022, we find that the probability of observing a new disaster in a country increases with the frequency of new disasters observed in the previous 100 days in that country. We propose a research agenda to study the ecological rationality of proverbs. Our results are also potentially relevant to humanitarian analysts.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Other; Psychology; Cognitive architectures; Decision making; Other; Computational Modeling"}],"section":"Papers with Poster Presentation","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4sm473zh","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Alex","middle_name":"","last_name":"Odlum","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Lausanne","department":""},{"first_name":"Julian","middle_name":"","last_name":"Marewski","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Lausanne","department":""},{"first_name":"Joerg","middle_name":"","last_name":"Dietz","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Lausanne","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2024-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/24026/galley/13620/download/"},{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/24026/galley/21366/download/"}]}