Simple Heuristics that Make Us Smart

by Gerd Gigerenzer, Peter M. Todd, ABC Research Group

Overview

Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart invites readers to embark on a new journey into a land of rationality that differs from the familiar territory of cognitive science and economics. Traditional views of rationality tend to see decision makers as possessing superhuman powers of reason, limitless knowledge, and all of eternity in which to ponder choices. To understand decisions in the real world, we need a different, more psychologically plausible notion of rationality, and this book provides it. It is about fast and frugal heuristics--simple rules for making decisions when time is pressing and deep thought an unaffordable luxury. These heuristics can enable both living organisms and artificial systems to make smart choices, classifications, and predictions by employing bounded rationality. But when and how can such fast and frugal heuristics work? Can judgments based simply on one good reason be as accurate as those based on many reasons? Could less knowledge even lead to systematically better predictions than more knowledge? Simple Heuristics explores these questions, developing computational models of heuristics and testing them through experiments and analyses. It shows how fast and frugal heuristics can produce adaptive decisions in situations as varied as choosing a mate, dividing resources among offspring, predicting high school drop out rates, and playing the stock market. As an interdisciplinary work that is both useful and engaging, this book will appeal to a wide audience. It is ideal for researchers in cognitive psychology, evolutionary psychology, and cognitive science, as well as in economics and artificial intelligence. It will also inspire anyone interested in simply making good decisions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780190286767
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	10/12/2000
Series:	Evolution and Cognition
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

Dr. Gerd Gigerenzer is the Director of the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition, Max Planck Institute for Human Development. Dr. Peter M. Todd is Research Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development.

Table of Contents

	The ABC Research Group
1	Fast and Frugal Heuristics: The Adaptive Toolbox	3
2	The Recognition Heuristic: How Ignorance Makes Us Smart	37
3	Can Ignorance Beat the Stock Market?	59
4	Betting on One Good Reason: The Take The Best Heuristic	75
5	How Good Are Simple Heuristics?	97
6	Why Does One-Reason Decision Making Work? A Case Study in Ecological Rationality	119
7	When Do People Use Simple Heuristics, and How Can We Tell?	141
8	Bayesian Benchmarks for Fast and Frugal Heuristics	169
9	Hindsight Bias: A Price Worth Paying for Fast and Frugal Memory	191
10	Quick Estimation: Letting the Environment Do the Work	209
11	Categorization by Elimination: Using Few Cues to Choose	235
12	How Motion Reveals Intention: Categorizing Social Interactions	257
13	From Pride and Prejudice to Persuasion: Satisficing in Mate Search	287
14	Parental Investment by Simple Decision Rules	309
15	Demons Versus Heuristics in Artificial Intelligence, Behavioral Ecology, and Economics	327
16	What We Have Learned (So Far)	357
	References	367
	Name Index	397
	Subject Index	406

What People are Saying About This

Herbert Simon

In the past few years, the theory of rational ("sensible") human behavior has broken loose from the illusory and empirically unsupported notion that deciding rationally means maximizing expected utility. Research has learned to take seriously and study empirically how real human beings ... actually address the vast complexities of the world they inhabit. Simple Heuristics ... offers a fascinating introduction to this revolution in cognitive science, striking a great blow for sanity in the approach to human rationality.

Reinhard Selten

This book is a major contribution to the theory of bounded rationality. It illustrates that the surprising efficiency of fast and simple procedures is due to their fit with the structure of the environment in which they are used. The emphasis on this "ecological rationality" is an advance in a promising and already fruitful new direction of research.

Steven Pinker

Gigerenzer & Todd's volume represents a major advance in our understanding of human reasoning, with many genuinely new ideas on how people think and an impressive body of data to back them up. Simple Heuristics is indispensable for cognitive psychologists, economists, and anyone else interested in reason and rationality.

Donald Norman

How do people cope in the real, complex world of confusing and overwhelming information and rapidly approaching deadlines? This important book starts a new quest for answers. Here, Gigerenzer, Todd, and their lively research group show that simple heuristics are powerful tools that do surprisingly well. The field of decision making will never be the same again.

Editorial Reviews

"How do people cope in the real, complex world of confusing and overwhelming information and rapidly approaching deadlines? This important book starts a new quest for answers. Here, Gigerenzer, Todd, and their lively research group show that simple heuristics are powerful tools that do surprisingly well. The field of decision making will never be the same again."—Donald A. Norman, author of Things That Make Us Smart and The Invisible Computer

"Gigerenzer & Todd's volume represents a major advance in our understanding of human reasoning, with many genuinely new ideas on how people think and an impressive body of data to back them up. Simple Heuristics is indispensable for cognitive psychologists, economists, and anyone else interested in reason and rationality."—Steven Pinker, author of How the Mind Works and Words and Rules

"In the past few years, the theory of rational (sensible) human behavior has broken loose from the illusory and empirically unsupported notion that deciding rationally means maximizing expected utility. Research has learned to take seriously and study empirically how real human beings ... actually address the vast complexities of the world they inhabit. Simple Heuristics ... offers a fascinating introduction to this revolution in cognitive science, striking a great blow for sanity in the approach to human rationality."—Herbert A. Simon, Carnegie Mellon University, and Nobel Laureate in Economics

"This book is a major contribution to the theory of bounded rationality. It illustrates that the surprising efficiency of fast and simple procedures is due to their fit with the structure of the environment in which they are used. The emphasis on this ecological rationality is an advance in a promising and already fruitful new direction of research."—Reinhard Selten, Professor of Economics at the University of Bonn, and Nobel Laureate in Economics

"In recent years, and particularly in the culture wars, many people have written about rationality. These authors now provide a summary of this recent history, organized on the basis of different types of decision making. In each case, the authors summarize the literature so as to provide an implicit history. But the book is more fundamentally aimed at making rationality workable by showing 'the way that real people make the majority of their inferences and decisions.'"—Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences

"The underlying argument of the book is that the environments in which we evolved and in which we now live have certain regularities, and that decision making mechanisms—both evolved mechanisms, and the mechanisms that we actually use today—take advantage of these environmental regularities. Most of the book illustrates this argument by showing that in many circumstances shortcut decision making mechanisms (the 'simple heuristics' of the title) are remarkably accurate...This book by Gigerenzer and his associates marks a significant advance in the analysis." — Paul H. Rubin, Journal of Bioeconomics, Vol 2, 2000

From the Publisher