Rationality for Mortals: How People Cope with Uncertainty

by Gerd Gigerenzer

Gerd 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.

Genres: Psychology, Philosophy, Science, Economics, Nonfiction, Social Science, Social

256 pages, Hardcover

First published April 4, 2008

About the author

Gerd Gigerenzer is a German psychologist who has studied the use of bounded rationality and heuristics in decision making, especially in medicine. A critic of the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, he argues that heuristics should not lead us to conceive of human thinking as riddled with irrational cognitive biases, but rather to conceive rationality as an adaptive tool that is not identical to the rules of formal logic or the probability calculus.

Gerd Gigerenzer ist ein deutscher Psychologe und seit 1997 Direktor der Abteilung „Adaptives Verhalten und Kognition“ und seit 2009 Direktor des Harding-Zentrum für Risikokompetenz, beide am Max-Planck-Institut für Bildungsforschung in Berlin. Er ist mit Lorraine Daston verheiratet.

Gigerenzer arbeitet über begrenzte Rationalität, Heuristiken und einfache Entscheidungsbäume, das heißt über die Frage, wie man rationale Entscheidungen treffen kann, wenn Zeit und Information begrenzt und die Zukunft ungewiss ist (siehe auch Entscheidung unter Ungewissheit). Der breiten Öffentlichkeit ist er mit seinem Buch Bauchentscheidungen, bekannt geworden; dieses Buch wurde in 17 Sprachen übersetzt und veröffentlicht.

[English bio taken from English Wikipedia article]

[Deutsche Autorenbeschreibung aus dem deutschen Wikipedia-Artikel übernommen]

Reviews

[Dio Mavroyannis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Instant classic. I imagine that if someone who is not all versed in academic literature comes to read this book, they will quickly walk away whispering 'trivial garbage'. But for those steeped in academic literature, especially of the 'irrational' psychology type this is ground breaking. It takes almost every traditional experiment that purports to show irrational behavior and completely turns it around. This is one of the best books i've read this year, highly recommended. I would probably recommend going through "Thinking fast and slow" first so you can familiarize yourself with the common pop psychology arguments.

[Samyak Ahuja · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most people who will read this book are either psychologists or philosophists, but coming from a Computer Science background and being very interested in Artificial Intelligence, I was pleased to see the interplay and interdisciplinary nature between the two. Gerd Gigerenzer explains in detail some of the shortcoming of earlier works, like those of Tversky and Kahneman, and puts forth his research hypothesis with a lot of examples, so much so that even a mortal like me could understand. Few ideas in this field have affected me thus, one being the concept of Bicameral mind by Julian Jaynes and the second this. Must read.

[Gavin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Yet another volley in the ‘rationality wars’. GG sets himself against the heuristics and biases folk (though note he is also not of the fatuous constructionist camp which says, roughly: ‘it’s impossible for everyone to be irrational, because reason is only social, so we are the measure of it’) by minimising the apparent irrationality uncovered by the cognitive sciences in the last little while. Key claims:

- Heuristics are not just faster or more tractable, but better than Bayesian formalism.
- People are not flawed Bayesians but natural frequentists.


But though his work on presenting natural frequencies is super-important, and his points about actual decisions always being 'ecological' (rather than a mathematical problem) I suspect he's (still) 1) attacking a straw version of Kahneman-Gilovich-Slovic-Stanovich: no-one is saying that perfect, everyday Bayesian algorithmics is attainable by humans; nor are the misconceptions in table 1.1 (p.9) ever stated as strongly as this.

Also 2) GG's evidence on e.g. the framing of the conjunction fallacy doesn't replicate. But anyway this is well-argued, well-written, scientific in the highest sense, and wrong? Read this instead.

Not as deep as I expected, but I admire his empirical work.

[Jan D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Why is it that people choose options that are not optimal from a mathematical perspective? Gigerenzer shows the ingenious and simple heuristics that help us to decide mostly right most of the time. Particularly interesting his take on »cognitive biases« (which are often not biased, actually)

[Ryan Pennell · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a collection of essays about rationality, risk and basic rules of thumb. I read this book because of a suggestion of a friend. I am not sure if this book is used in a classroom setting or not, but it seems like it would be a good book to pull from for a humanities class to learn about statistics and probability. As a person that has studied probability theory at a graduate level I didn't get much out of the book other than how to explain concepts is a less mathematical manner. If you are not a 'math person' but have had at least a first semester of calculus I think you might get a lot from this book. I could also imagine this book being one of the reading for a 'reading intensive' course for students that are studying the humanities. Also, perhaps this would be a good book for someone studying cognition, as a way to begin their study of prob/stat. Not a bad book by any means but I was not the target audience. So, 3/5 stars for me.

[Blahblahblahs · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really excellent read. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in aligning themselves with academics, science, facts, etc., but especially to those who are in the social sciences. Gigerenzer investigates logic, academic rigour, and statistics through a lens that, I find, is more accurate and infinitely more interesting than how modern academics approach human rationale.

There's too much to be said for me to bother writing into a review. Still, I think that this book is really helpful in orienting yourself to have a healthy relationship with "Academia," both through what is literally written in the book and everything you can parse from what the book isn't explicitly saying... like academic circle-jerks and

[Gapag · Rating 3 out of 5]

People who are not knee-deep into statistics, like me, might find some chapters hard to follow.

The book is definitely worth reading. It contains insights that are seldom found anywhere else; for instance, it confirmed for me that there is no agreement on the fundamentals of statistics (which in hindsight should be obvious, since we are talking about uncertainty...).

Its major drawback is that, being a popularizing book, it is not very well written, because each chapter is an adaptation from some of the author's published articles.
Hence the style, albeit sometimes soberly humoristic, reflects the stiffness of research articles or, even worse, EU grant applications.

[Abdullah Cemil Akcam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Adaptive toolbox concept offered by Give render and his collaborators is really a third way along with probabilistic rationality and heuristics and biases programs. This program asserts that external representation of the information is important for reasoning . When conditional probabilities, for example, expressed as natural frequencies, reasoning improves.
There are some parts in the book, especially chapters 10 and 13, providing excellent review of literature or history . This is a must read in decision making area.

[Fabian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gigerenzers other books are definitely better then this one. While some essays are interesting (like the one on Health Care), many are useless trivia (like the annoying tendency of academics to endlessly prove/ disprove theories in their field that nobody but academics has any use for). While interesting things like Heuristics were covered too briefly.

[Rafael Jordão · Rating 5 out of 5]

Livro deveria ter em.português. e deveria ser discutido fortemente nos cursos de psicologia. Os argumentos são construídos de forma clara e ainda assim é denso e trabalhoso de ler. Vale a pena. As críticas ao trabalho do kahneman e tversky são muito interessantes.