Alexander de Guzman

Our environment can influence what we like. Advertisements may lead you to care about trendy foods, or a friend may push you towards a genre of music. Yet, the adoption of values from the world around us is not typically within the scope of theories of rationality in philosophy and cognitive science. In this paper, we take a first step in understanding how environmental influences on values fit into a picture of rationality. Leveraging work on persistent attentional biases, we argue that exogenous direction of attention can under some conditions drive value change through two connections: in the moment attention leading to the acquisition of longer-term attentional patterns, and longer-term attentional patterns driving the agent’s structuring of tasks. These changes are intimately related to values, and on some accounts constitute value change. Crucially, we argue that openness to environmental influence on values is not an unfortunate flaw that we happen to suffer, but an efficient, resource-rational solution to a constrained optimization problem.