We are sympathetic to Boyer & Petersen's (B&P's) overall approach to folk-economic beliefs (FEBs) but believe their evolutionary psychology perspective would benefit from taking into greater account developmental and cultural-evolutionary factors. We focus by way of example on FEB 5, “emporiophobia” (hostility to markets). According to B&P, information about markets activates a partner-choice system that evolved in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA) and that “requires that the parties in a transaction be identifiable as specific individuals” (sect. 5.4, para. 3). This requirement has been less and less satisfied in the history of markets. Modern financial markets in particular involve mostly impersonal transactions, and this explains current emporiophobia. B&P's account implies that the historical development of markets had to overcome ever-increasingly hostile FEBs. This renders the success of market economy rather puzzling, not to say paradoxical. The independently motivated modifications of B&P's account of FEBs that we propose resolve the puzzle.

We accept the evolutionary hypothesis that a “partner-choice system” and similar cognitive mechanisms evolved in the EEA. We disagree on the exact function of these mechanisms. One possible view, suggested by B&P, is that what evolved in the EEA are modules that apply specialized inferential procedures to relevant inputs and that have remained part of modern humans' cognitive tool-kit. Because the input information that these modules process may vary across societies and historical periods, so may their intuitive output. This explains why FEBs, which are reflective elaboration of these intuitive outputs, also tend to differ across cultures.

We suggest an alternative approach (see Mercier & Sperber Reference Mercier and Sperber2017, Ch. 4; Sperber & Hirschfeld Reference Sperber, Hirschfeld, Carruthers, Laurence and Stich2007). Many cognitive mechanisms that have evolved in the EEA were not inference modules ready to process information but modular templates (or, in other terms, specialized acquisition devices) used in the course of individual cognitive development to acquire, on the basis of experience and cultural inputs, locally adjusted inferential procedures (just as a biologically evolved language acquisition ability combines with culturally evolved linguistic inputs to produce people's knowledge of their local language). In particular, we hypothesize that information locally relevant to partner choice is not fed to an ancestral partner-choice inferential module identical in all cultures. It is fed rather to inferential modules acquired in the course of cognitive development. Because these acquired modules are all based on the same evolved template, only limited cultural variability is to be expected. Still, the resulting modules are adjusted to the local cultural environment, and so are the intuitions they deliver.

This developmental hypothesis has consequences for cultural evolution. It helps explains how, in the course of human history, what may have been undertaken as a risky innovation by one generation can appear an intuitive practice to the next generation. We may speculate, for instance, that the first people in a prehistoric community who took the risk of engaging in economic exchanges beyond their familiar social network had to overcome the strong intuition that you cannot trust strangers. If, however, their risk-taking ended up being beneficial, their descendants would have grown up witnessing such exchanges as normal practice. They presumably developed with somewhat different intuitions about whom to trust. A readiness to choose economic partners on the basis of reputation even in the absence of prior acquaintance had become the “new normal.” Less speculatively, Avner Greif (Reference Greif2004) has shown how, in medieval Europe, trading relationships across cities, instead of relying just on acquaintance and reputation, began to rely also on expectations of impersonal justice based on mutual agreements among independent cities. Generations born in a system where these expectations guided ordinary practices took them for granted, developed their intuitions from there, and acquired reflective folk-economic beliefs on the basis of these intuitions.

In the modern world, several types of market coexist; from farmers' markets to bitcoin exchanges, from gun shows to the NASDAQ. Different people have different attitudes towards these various institutions. What Rubin (Reference Rubin2014) and B&P describe as emporiophobia is typically an attitude towards financial markets held by people who are not very knowledgeable about them. A more comprehensive study of contemporary FEBs about different types of market would have to look at this whole range of intuitions and explicit beliefs and at how they relate to one another. What we suggest is that these intuitions themselves result not from feeding information about these markets to intuitive systems which “evolved before and outside markets” (sect. 4.1), as B&P would have it, but from the modularization of different inferential competencies in laypeople and in experts.

Emporiophobia is a common FEB of ordinary people who are not active agents in these markets and who realize that what happens there, though opaque and beyond their control, can have major effects on their lives. Financial market actors and experts, on the other hand, are rarely if ever emporiophobic: They stand to benefit greatly from financial markets, and have a vested interest in convincing laypeople that these markets work for the greater good of all. In these conditions, it is not clear to what extent lay-people's emporiophobia is a reaction to the high impersonality of financial markets, and to what extent it is a reaction to their power and opacity, and to the lack of impartiality of the experts.