Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Why does "inefficiency" survive? We propose that apparent inefficiency is not a cognitive defect but an artifact of evaluative mismatch. The Off-Book framework identifies two survival requirements unmeasured in laboratory ledgers: biological survival (avoiding ruin) and social survival (avoiding isolation). Our core insight: the subject's condition determines T (trial capacity), and T determines whether expected value becomes a valid reference. Empirical results (N = 100; loss aversion d = 0.99, sunk cost d = 0.47, interaction p = .004) confirm that rationality judgments shift when survival risks arise. We argue for a transition from Universal to Relative Rationality—where the scientist's N = 100 ensemble and the subject's N = 1 intuition both derive from the same principle. Under the same ecology, subjects may hold contradictory rationality due to the attributes they carry in their position. The bias is not in the subject—it is in the ruler.