We're writing up a manuscript I'm pretty excited about, except it has inspired some feminist ranting on a pretty fundamental concept in decision making: "exploration". A basic premise in decision making is you explore the values of options, then you choose the best option.

Exploration depends on the assumption that your world is more likely to be filled with rewards than punishments.

The field of decision making is dominated by men who have been successful in their careers, meaning that by definition this assumption has been true for them.

Research on gender and sex influences on decision making have often framed failing to explore as nonoptimal, and thus make an argument that females aren't as good at decision making. However, I think this makes a hugely gendered assumption about what "good decisions" are.

For essentially every being *other* than powerful people, life is nasty, brutish, and short, and shorter if you mess up. In light of this, choosing to *change* strategies, particularly after finding one that works well enough, goes against "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".

There is an implicit requirement in decision making tasks that exploration must be required for making good decisions, because otherwise, how would you know what is optimal, or even available? But this requirement reveals the biases of the people who set up the system.

First, it assumes that there is some knowable "optimal" choice that gets the most physical reward, be it money or sugar. It is foolish to pretend that this is a state that exists the real world. Don't @ me with "no one really believes this" bc I have talked to scientists who do.

Second, it assumes that maximizing the physical reward is a obviously best. But what if the subject values ease? What if the subject values safety? And what if choosing an easy, safe strategy produces some physical reward anyway? Why stress over getting a little bit more?

I'm beginning to question the assumption that exploration is a quality of good decision making. In human work, it assumes that people have lived safe lives where seeking information has resulted in good outcomes. This is not a valid assumption for much of humanity.

In animal work, this assumption creates lots of puzzling observations, where animals seem to do something "nonoptimal" that actually reveals *we* don't understand what they value. For example, mice come from an ecological niche where exploration means they are likely to be eaten.

The focus on information seeking as an active process necessary to good decision making conflates exploration and strategy selection. It is an accident of laboratory tasks that are set up to reward exploration.

But what if information could be gathered without overt exploration? We find that this is the case - for female mice more than males. Stay tuned!