Gigerenzer,G.
Sturm,T.

The paper shows why and how an empirical study of fast-and-frugal heu- ristics can provide norms of good reasoning, and thus how (and how far) rationality can be naturalized. We explain the heuristics that humans often rely on in solving problems, for example, choosing investment strategies or apartments, placing bets in sports, ormaking library searches.We then showthat heuristics can lead to judgments that are as accurate as or evenmore accurate than strategies that usemore information and computation, including optimization methods. A standard way to defend the use of heuristics is by reference to accuracy-effort trade-offs. We take a different route, emphasizing ecological rationality (the relationship between cognitive heuristics and environment), and argue that in uncertain environments, more information and compu- tation are not always better (the “less-can-be-more” doctrine).The resulting naturalism about rationality is thus normative because it not only describes what heuristics people use, but also in which specific environments one should rely on a heuristic in order to make better inferences.While we desist from claiming that the scope of ecological rationality is unlimited, we think it is of wide practical use.

Gigerenzer, G., & Sturm, T. (2012). How (far) can rationality be naturalized? Synthese, 187, 243-268. doi:10.1007/s11229-011-0030-6 (Full text)

Publication year	2012
Document type:	Article
Publication status:	Published
External URL:	http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11229-011-0030-6 View
Categories:	Ecological RationalityEnvironment StructureInvestmentSports
Keywords:	heuristicsjudgment and decision-makingrationalityuncertainty