Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart

"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

<br>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.<br>

The ABC Research Group; I. THE RESEARCH AGENDA; 1. Fast and Frugal Heuristics: The Adaptive Toolbox; II. IGNORANCE-BASED DECISION MAKING; 2. The Recognition Heuristic: How Ignorance Makes Us Smart; 3. Can Ignorance Beat the Stock Market?; III. ONE-REASON DECISION MAKING; 4. Betting on One Good Reason: The Take The Best Heuristic; 5. How Good Are Simple Heuristics?; 6. Why Does One-Reason Decision Making Work? A Case Study in Ecological Rationality; 7. When Do People Use Simple Heuristics, and How Can We Tell?; 8. Bayesian Benchmarks for Fast and Frugal Heuristics; IV. BEYOND CHOICE: MEMORY, ESTIMATION, AND CATEGORIZATION; 9. Hindsight Bias: A Price Worth Paying for Fast and Frugal Memory; 10. Quick Estimation: Letting the Environment Do the Work; 11. Categorization by Elimination: Using Few Cues to Choose; V. SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE; 12. How Motion Reveals Intention: Categorizing Social Interactions; 13. From Pride and Prejudice to Persuasion: Satisficing in Mate Search; 14. Parental Investment by Simple Decision Rules; VI. A LOOK AROUND, A LOOK BACK, A LOOK AHEAD; 15. Demons versus Heuristics in Artificial Intelligence, Behavioral Ecology, and Economis; 16. What We Have Learned (So Far); References; Name Index; Subject Index