This is a speculative text about the Apex and Frontman fallacies from a layman who's trying to understand cognitive biases. Probably waste of your time. I think that the Apex fallacy exists as a hard-wired psychological mechanism and try to prove it. The Frontman fallacy's was more evasive from the perspective I took (evolutionary biases). It's a shame that, apparently, no scholarly studies exist.

I'm trying to make sense of cognitive biases (or what Wikipedia calls cognitive biases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_bias ). In case you didn't know:

A cognitive bias is a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment.

It seems that most biases can be seen as mental shortcuts. As Kahneman wrote in Thinking fast and slow, the brain tries to conserve energy by not thinking more than what it has to. So, evolution has come up with all kinds of heuristics - let's call them mental shortcuts - that make judgements without long thought processes. Furthermore, it helps, if a lion is attacking, to run instead of thinking about running. So, shortcuts have actually at least two purposes: conserving energy and speeding up the decision processes.

Perhaps the most useful mental shortcut to know about is the Availability heuristic. It's also a great example. I once had a discussion with a male feminist who insisted that women have to wear really revealing clothes. I said that he just think so because the women who wear such clothes are unusual and exciting, so, he tends to remember them when he thinks about women's clothing. That's Availability heuristic: what's unusual, emotional, and recent is more available to our thought processes and, thus, to our judgements. (The guy went out, came back, and said that I was right, which has been one of the very rare occasions when I have been able to make somebody change his or her mind on social media.)

So, mental shortcuts can lead us astray. Actually, the reason why they are talked about so much is probably the fact that they often lead to universal and recurrent and thus predictable judgement errors.

But when certain mental shortcuts first came about they must have been useful; otherwise evolution would have removed them. It must have been useful to base your judgements, for example, on unusual, emotional, and recent things.

So, I don't think that biases always are "deviations of norm or rationality". Rather, they are often mental shortcuts that serve a purpose, or, at least, served a purpose for our ancestors, and

  • that purpose must have been rational from the perspective of evolution, and
  • the purpose of evolution is to produce sexually mature offspring, and
  • thus some of the biases served our and our children's survival.

A mental shortcut had a reason, an evolutionary purpose.

Now, "Apex fallacy" seems to refer to something that is logically wrong. And, indeed, it is logically wrong to "evaluate a group based on the performance of best group members, not a representative sample of the group members".

But why do we do it? Is there an evolutionary purpose to take this particular mental shortcut? I don't think this has been studied in a laboratory or real life. Or if it has, there should, could be a Wikipedia article on it. Nevertheless, it seems to make very much sense to make a judgement about a group by the one or ones who are at the top, the "apex". Millions of years of evolution have taught us to understand who, within human groups, is the leader and to pay attention to what he does. And though we are not chimpanzees, it's still educational to study how their social life revolves around the alpha male.

Is the Apex fallacy, then, not so much a logical mistake, but one of the fundamental human biases, the Apex heuristic? I think it could be. I think we are hard-wired to judge social groups by observing the leader or leaders. And, as with so many mental shortcuts, something that made perfect sense millions of years ago, in modern societies leads astray. In free-market democracies among the powerful there are no alpha males left to watch, just marionettes who try to look like alphas.

Furthermore, there was, in our ape times, a difference between how males and females saw the leader. For males the alpha male was somebody to be afraid of or compete with - or in rare case be devoted and allied to. But for females he is somebody to mate with. Could this be one reason many women think we live in the "man's world", why they are prone to the Frontman fallacy, ”the mistaken belief that people (men, specifically) who are in positions of authority in democratic systems use their power mainly to benefit the categories of people (the category of “men”, in particular) that they belong to themselves"?

Men, at least in democratic societies, seldom see the men at the top as their friends and allies, not because of their sex, anyway. Their attitude is often deeply suspicious, they don't expect to get any special treatment because they are the same sex. And they are right in their thinking: through ages, male leaders have had no problem sending men to the battle fields and women to safety. Similarly, it would be insane to claim that business leaders would or could make decisions whose purpose was to favor men (unless it serves some money-making plan).

In other words, I don't think that the Frontman fallacy is something men indulge in. But what about women?

If our female ancestors saw no reason to compete with the alpha male or to be particularly afraid of, how did it affect their attitude towards the leader and the whole hierarchy? Unfortunately, I have only very speculative thoughts about that. Could it be that, though women understand hierarchies on an "ape level" probably as well as men, they have always been in some sense outsiders, not directly taking part in the fierce fight over leadership? It's been something "the males do". As outsiders they didn't have any reason to be particularly interested in what actually happens, the mechanics of the power struggle. Their interest has been to watch it only to know who is the winner - and the future father of the children of the lucky ones.

This starts to sound so far-fetched or simplistic that I apparently have to think this further.

But I still think that there could be a difference between men and women, insiders and outsiders when it comes to seeing the realm of power. And if so, there could be something called the Frontman bias, a predictable error, "deviation from rationality", that is more common among women than men.

Anyway, it would be interesting to test these hypotheses. Somebody, a psychologist or economist, should do it.