One can describe the sorts of errors that aircraft pilots make in reading instruments, and one can also try to design instruments that will lead to fewer or smaller errors. In connection with the prescriptive strand, it is worth noting that probability was invented only in the 17th century. Presumably, people had been making decisions for many hundreds of thousands of years previously. The invention of probability was motivated by the desire to improve certain types of decisions, especially those that arise in gambling and in setting insurance premiums and annuity payments. However, making use of this new input already constituted a change in the black box.
Human behavior depends on culture as well as on our evolutionary history.
Our legs evolved for walking and running, but we can use them to ride bicycles. Decision mechanisms that evolved to use qualitative kinds of evidence are also used to deal somehow with numerical probabilities. There is a prescriptive side to the study of human movement, in which design of bicycles and other apparatus is improved continually. Similarly, the design of decision aids is a prescriptive aspect of decision research. One goal is to improve the interface between numerical probability and human decision making.