How can anyone be rational in a world where knowledge is limited, time is pressing, and deep thought is often an unattainable luxury? Traditional models of unbounded rationality and optimization in cognitive science, economics, and animal behavior have tended to view decision-makers as possessing supernatural powers of reason, limitless knowledge, and endless time. But understanding decisions in the real world requires a more psychologically plausible notion of bounded rationality. In Simple heuristics that make us smart (Gigerenzer et al. 1999), we (...) explore fast and frugal heuristics – simple rules in the mind's adaptive toolbox for making decisions with realistic mental resources. These heuristics can enable both living organisms and artificial systems to make smart choices quickly and with a minimum of information by exploiting the way that information is structured in particular environments. In this précis, we show how simple building blocks that control information search, stop search, and make decisions can be put together to form classes of heuristics, including: ignorance-based and one-reason decision making for choice, elimination models for categorization, and satisficing heuristics for sequential search. These simple heuristics perform comparably to more complex algorithms, particularly when generalizing to new data – that is, simplicity leads to robustness. We present evidence regarding when people use simple heuristics and describe the challenges to be addressed by this research program. Key Words: adaptive toolbox; bounded rationality; decision making; elimination models; environment structure; heuristics; ignorance-based reasoning; limited information search; robustness; satisficing; simplicity. (shrink)

Replacing logical coherence by effectiveness as criteria of rationality, Gigerenzer et al. show that simple heuristics can outperform comprehensive procedures (e.g., regression analysis) that overload human limited information processing capacity. Although their work casts long overdue doubt on the normative status of the Rational Choice Paradigm, their methodology leaves open its relevance as to how decisions are actually made.

This commentary focuses on three issues raised by Gigerenzer, Todd, and the ABC Research Group (1999). First, I stress the need for further experimental evidence to determine which heuristics people use in cognitive judgment tasks. Second, I question the scope of cognitive models based on simple heuristics, arguing that many aspects of cognition are too sophisticated to be modeled in this way. Third, I note the complementary role that rational explanation can play to Gigenerenzer et al.'s “ecological” analysis of why (...) heuristics succeed. (shrink)

In this paper I identify a new group of aesthetic norms, which I call norms of cultivation. Judgments of taste are often accompanied by forecasts or expectations about future aesthetic satisfaction. When we find something beautiful, we expect to find it beautiful in the future. Forecasting is at play in all sorts of aesthetically motivated behavior. Yet psychologists have observed an unreliability in such forecasts. As a result of forecasting error, what we take as our taste can be an unreliable (...) guide in our aesthetic lives. Compensating for the unreliability of taste are norms of cultivation, implicit rules for engaging objects, such as avoiding overexposure to favored objects or exposure under unfavorable conditions. Norms of cultivation help to regularize aesthetic experience, mitigating unreliability in forecasts, and fostering the ongoing stability and coherence of taste. (shrink)