The essential issue seems to be here that your friend is claiming that because humans aren't perfect Bayesians that Bayesianism is somehow philosophically wrong. Whether human cognition is flawed even severely doesn't impact whether or not Bayesianism is a better approach. Note that your friend's argument if it were valid then it would apply not just to Bayesianism but any attempt to use statistics. It is pretty clear that humans pay a lot more attention to anecdotes than actual stats for example. By this argument, statistics themselves should be ignored.
This seems in essence to be an is v. ought fallacy.
One might be tempted to assume that if the human specie evolved as so blatantly non-Bayesian, yet survived and took over the world, then Bayesianism is probably incorrect. Because if it was, then surely any specie that would have evolved Bayesianism would have taken over the world instead of us. If we have this in mind, that should take care of the "be vs ought" fallacy, because what ought to be, would be.
I reject this argument however, mainly because Bayesian calculations are simply intractable. Even when they are, "Yikes! A tiger!!" i...
I have recently been corresponding with a friend who studies psychology regarding human cognition and the best underlying models for understanding it. His argument, summarized very briefly, is given by this quote:
I am having trouble synthesizing a response that captures the Bayesian point of view (and is sufficiently backed up by sources so that it will be useful for my friend rather than just gainsaying of the argument) because I am mostly a decision theory / probability person. Are these works of psychology and neuroscience really illustrating that human emotion governs decision making? What are some good neuroscience papers to read that deal with this, and how do Bayesians respond? It may be that everything he mentions above is a correct assessment (I don't know and don't have enough time to read the books right now), but that it is irrelevant if you want to make good decisions rather than just accept the types of decisions we already make.