Rationality for Mortals: How People Cope with UncertaintyGerd Gigerenzer's influential work examines the rationality of individuals not from the perspective of logic or probability, but from the point of view of adaptation to the real world of human behavior and interaction with the environment. Seen from this perspective, human behavior is more rational than it might otherwise appear. This work is extremely influential and has spawned an entire research program. This volume (which follows on a previous collection, Adaptive Thinking, also published by OUP) collects his most recent articles, looking at how people use "fast and frugal heuristics" to calculate probability and risk and make decisions. It includes a newly writen, substantial introduction, and the articles have been revised and updated where appropriate. This volume should appeal, like the earlier volumes, to a broad mixture of cognitive psychologists, philosophers, economists, and others who study decision making. |
Contents
2 Fast and Frugal Heuristics | 20 |
3 Rules of Thumb in Animals and Humans | 46 |
4 I Think Therefore I Err | 65 |
5 Striking a Blow for Sanity in Theories of Rationality | 80 |
6 Out of the Frying Pan into the Fire | 92 |
7 Whats in a Sample? A Manual for Building Cognitive Theories | 99 |
8 A 30 Percent Chance of Rain Tomorrow | 117 |
9 Understanding Risks in Health Care | 127 |
10 The Evolution of Statistical Thinking | 136 |
11 Mindless Statistics | 152 |
12 Children Can Solve Bayesian Problems | 172 |
Innumeracy Defeated | 192 |
| 203 | |
| 231 | |
| 239 | |
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Common terms and phrases
30 percent adaptive toolbox adults answer as-if ball base rate Bayes’s rule Bayesian Bayesian reasoning Bayesian responses behavior bounded rationality breast cancer cognitive illusions conditional probabilities conjunction fallacy cues decision ecological rationality environment errors example experimental fast and frugal figure Fisher gaze heuristic Gigerenzer graders hindsight bias Hoffrage human hypothesis testing inferences innumeracy instance interpretation intuitive judgment Kahneman learning level of significance logic mathematical mean memory mind natural frequencies Neyman Neyman-Pearson null hypothesis null hypothesis testing null ritual objects optimization models optimization under constraints overfitting p-value participants patients people’s percent chance players pre-Bayes predict probabilities of rain problem psychology question rain tomorrow random sampling recognition heuristic red nose reference class regression representations result rules of thumb sequential sampling simple heuristics single-event probabilities social solve statistical thinking STATISTICIAN stopping rule strategy structure superego take-the-best take-the-best heuristic theory tion Tversky validity variables