“Defensive mechanisms can make two symmetric kinds of mistakes: they can fail to activate in the presence of a threat (false negatives) or become activated when no threat is present (false positives). Even when defenses are functional and optimally calibrated, errors cannot be completely avoided; given the tradeoffs between the costs of different types of errors, the smoke detector principle suggests that defensive systems should typically evolve to commit more false positives than false negatives.” Homo SapiensEvolutionary BiologyEvolutionary PsychopathologyEvolutionaryEvolutionary MismatchEvolutionary AnthropologyTradeoff Book:Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach Source: Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach