Adaptive Bias
The notion that the human brain has evolved to reason adaptively, rather than truthfully or even rationally, and that cognitive bias may have evolved as a mechanism to reduce the overall cost of cognitive errors as opposed to merely reducing the number of cognitive errors, when faced with making a decision under conditions of uncertainty.
Origin
While Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman introduced cognitive biases in 1972, the adaptive framework emerged later through a "rationality war" between Gerd Gigerenzer and the Kahneman-Tversky school. Haselton and Buss formalized the concept in 2003, arguing that cognitive biases evolved for tasks where uncertainty makes the cost of one error type (false positive or false negative) dramatically outweigh the alternative. This evolutionary perspective reframed biases from cognitive defects to adaptive mechanisms that prioritize speed and survival over accuracy.