Intuitions guide decision-making, and looking to the evolutionary history of humans illuminates why some behavioral responses are more intuitive than others. Yet a place remains for cognitive processes to second-guess intuitive responses – that is, to be reflective – and individual differences abound in automatic, intuitive processing as well.

We applaud Boyer & Petersen's (B&P's) article on economic folk beliefs. We believe that it is crucial for the future of democracy to identify the cognitive systems through which people form their beliefs about the working of the economy. In this commentary, we put forward the idea that, although many systems are involved, fairness is probably the main driver of folk-economic beliefs.

We applaud Boyer & Petersen's (B&P's) approach to a fascinating topic. Their arguments against understanding folk-economic beliefs (FEBs) in terms of economic ignorance or specific biases, however, are overly pessimistic. Economic theory is the reason beliefs about such disparate phenomena are labeled “economic” and “folk.” More importantly, some FEBs are better understood by examining current rather than ancestral contexts of exchange.

Competition between political parties is a fundamental feature of democratic politics, but it is underplayed in the target article. We argue that a more comprehensive understanding of “folk-economic beliefs” (FEBs) must consider the ability of partisan elites to both shape citizens' economic beliefs and connect them to political choices. We review recent empirical findings supporting this theoretical perspective.

There are no clear criteria regarding what kind of beliefs should count as folk-economic beliefs (FEBs), or any way to make an exhaustive list that could be filtered through such criteria. This allows the target article authors, Boyer & Petersen, to cherry-pick FEBs, which results in the omission of some well-established FEBs. The authors do not sufficiently address a strong relationship between ideology and FEBs.

People are social animals who value social goods uniquely. In discussions about how economic policies are evaluated by the layperson, it is essential to consider how they may evoke repulsive social emotions such as disgust and anger. We propose that fear of economic policies is not general and that it is specific to items where markets tend to assault certain social values.

The target article by Boyer & Petersen (B&P) contributes a vital message: that people have folk economic theories that shape their thoughts and behavior in the marketplace. This message is all the more important because, in the history of economic thought, Homo economicus was increasingly stripped of mental capacities. Intuitive theories can help restore the mind of Homo economicus.

Boyer & Petersen's (B&P's) evolutionary approach to folk-economic beliefs is insightful, with far-reaching implications. We add to their discussion by positing a complementary developmental approach to the study of “emporiophobia” – studying children whose behaviors provide insight into developmental origins. We hypothesize that emporiophobia emerges early in childhood through proximal mechanisms and propose that emporiophobia develops alongside emporiophilia.

We propose an extension to Boyer & Petersen's (B&P's) framework for folk-economic beliefs, suggesting that certain evolutionarily acquired cognitive inference systems can cause modern humans to perceive abstract systems such as the economy as willful, goal-oriented agents. Such an anthropomorphized view, we argue, can have meaningful effects on people's moral evaluations of these agents, as well as on their political and economic behavior.

Evolved dispositions influence, but do not determine, how people think about economic problems. The evolutionary cognitive approach offers important insights but underweights the social transmission of ideas as a level of explanation. The need for a social explanation for the evolution of economic attitudes is evidenced, for example, by immense variations in folk-economic beliefs over time and across individuals.

Boyer & Petersen (B&P) argue that a “rudimentary exchange psychology” is responsible for many of people's folk-economic beliefs that are at odds with the consensus views of economists. However, they focus primarily on macroeconomic beliefs. I argue that the same rudimentary exchange psychology could be expected to produce fairly accurate microeconomic intuitions. Existing evidence supports this prediction.

Zero-sum thinking and aversion to trade pervade our society, yet fly in the face of everyday experience and the consensus of economists. Boyer & Petersen's (B&P's) evolutionary model invokes coalitional psychology to explain these puzzling intuitions. I raise several empirical challenges to this explanation, proposing two alternative mechanisms – intuitive mercantilism (assigning value to money rather than goods) and errors in perspective-taking.

Although Boyer & Petersen's (B&P's) target article provides an exciting framework for political communication studies of framing effects, I raise questions concerning the presumed importance of folk-economic beliefs, the relative utility of identifying such proximate (as opposed to more generalized) drivers of public opinion, and the extent to which their model can explain variability among individuals. I conclude with thoughts on the normative implications of the evolutionary cognitive model for democratic governance.

We extend Boyer & Petersen's (B&P's) model of folk-economic beliefs (FEBs) by suggesting FEBs serve self-interest (broadly defined), which includes indirect benefits such as creating alliances, advancing self-beneficial ideologies, and signaling one's traits. By expanding the definition of self-interest, the model can predict who will hold what FEBs, which FEBs will propagate, when they will change, why, and in which direction.

Thought about abstract concepts is grounded in more concrete physical experiences. Applying this grounded cognition perspective to Boyer & Petersen's (B&P's) folk-economic beliefs, we highlight its implications for the activation, application, cultural acceptance, and context sensitivity of folk-economic beliefs.

Do folk-economic beliefs have an ultimate cause? We argue that, in many cases, the answer is negative. Cognition is constrained in both scope (via long-term memory [LTM]) and depth (via working memory [WM]). Consequently, laypeople are challenged by concepts essential for understanding complex systems, economics included: aggregation, indirect causation, and equilibrium. We discuss several economic misconceptions arising from this acute mismatch.

Developmental psychology can shed light on (1) the intuitive systems that underlie folk-economic beliefs (FEBs), and (2) how FEBs are created and revised. Boyer & Petersen (B&P) acknowledge the first, but we argue that they do not seriously consider the second. FEBs vary across people (and within a person), and much of this variation may be explained by socialization, social context, and social learning.

Researchers, including Boyer & Petersen (B&P), commonly use experimental economic studies to draw their conclusions. These studies conventionally strip away context and present participants only with abstract rules. Because context is a strictly necessary component of the decision-making process, it is not clear that inferences about high-level folk psychological concepts (e.g., rationality) can be drawn from decontextualized economic games.

Although Boyer & Petersen's (B&P's) cataloguing of and evolutionary explanations for folk-economic beliefs is important and valuable, the authors fail to connect their theories to existing explanations for why people do not think like economists. For instance, people often have moral intuitions akin to principles of fairness and justice that conflict with utilitarian approaches to resource allocation.

Economic exchange constitutes the basis of many, but not all, aspects of human cooperation. The incentives overlap with, but remain distinct in important ways, from other fundamental aspects of cooperation, including the organization of collective violence for combat. The specific alignment of sometimes-conflicting goals helps inform the construction of political ideology.