Agency, niche construction, and addiction: a response to Harrison and Ross (2025)

This review examines Harrison and Ross's The Gambling Animal (2025), which argues that humanity's distinctive achievement lies in its capacity for collective risk management rather than superior rationality or intelligence. It considers two issues central to this framework: the nature of agency and the explanatory role of niche construction. While Harrison and Ross portray agency as a distributed, risk-sensitive capacity emerging from biological and social systems, tensions remain with Ross's earlier economic account of agency. The review also questions whether niche construction successfully reconciles predictive processing with distributed and enactive approaches to cognition. Finally, it argues that their account of addiction would be strengthened by incorporating emotion, affect regulation, and trauma, thereby enriching their explanation of addiction and human vulnerability.