From here: an article discussing the benefits of biases
""Biased mechanisms are not design defects of the human mind, but rather design features," …Haselton likens a biased decision pathway to a smoke alarm that can make one of two errors. It can go off in the absence of fire—a false positive: irritating, but far from lethal. The more dangerous error is the false negative, which fails to signal a real fire. "Engineers can’t minimize both errors, because there’s a trade-off," explains Haselton. "If you lower the threshold for noting fires, you’re going to have more false alarms. Natural selection created decision-making adaptations not to maximize accuracy but to minimize the more costly error."
"Glenn Geher, an associate professor of psychology at SUNY at New Paltz, who, with Miller, edited a forthcoming volume on mating intelligence, is developing a mathematical model to demonstrate what many a grandmother has long cautioned: Women who are de facto skeptical of a man’s intentions are almost always better off than women who spend hours deconstructing the first date. ("He gave me his home number, he asked about my family, he mentioned a concert this spring—he must be into me!") Geher found that if a woman cannot accurately judge a man’s romantic designs at least 90 percent of the time, she’s better off being biased. "Women using a ‘men are always pigs’ decision-making rule may be more likely to actually end up with honest, committed, and long-term-seeking males," insists Geher."
Curt: "increasing degree of belief in any possible world is equivalent in effect to intensifying utilities in that same world by the same factor."
If it were the case that the mind had a big look-up table, specifying for each possible world our degree of belief in that world, then this transformation may not seem to add complexity and would preserve behavioural output. But that is not the way the mind works. My concern is that given the representational framwork we actually use, the operation of off-setting biases by modifying preferences may in fact increase complexity.
Gustavo, yes confidence signaling is one possibility for men.