Rationality for Mortals: How People Cope with Uncertainty (Evolution and Cognition)
Gerd Gigerenzer
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 0199747091
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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 collects recent articles, looking at how people use "fast and frugal heuristics" to calculate probability and risk and make decisions. It includes the revised articles and newly written introduction that were first published in the hardcover edition. Its appeal is to a mixture of cognitive psychologists, philosophers, economists, and others who study decision making.
"Gerd Gigerenzer has created new, pathbreaking ways of thinking about human rationality. His ideas build on one another and are best seen as part of a coherent whole that is when the nature of his arguments emerges most clearly."-- Leda Cosmides, University of California Santa Barbara
An Elementary Guide To Reliability (5th Edition)
cue and repeat the process until a choice was made. By using this stopping rule, participants can draw inferences without having to look up all of the available cue values. Note that vi does not result in the best order of cues but in a good-enough one: The problem of determining the optimal order is NP-hard, that is, computationally intractable (Martignon & Hoffrage, 2002). An important feature of the search rule is that the validities are unconditional (unlike the beta-weights in multiple
unfamiliar problems has not yet been cast into mathematical form, as the issue of combinatorial explosion has been, it strongly suggests that an optimizing approach to unfamiliar problems is rarely feasible when decision time is scarce. Optimization Does Not Imply an Optimal Outcome Some economists, biologists, and cognitive scientists seem to believe that a theory of bounded rationality must rely on optimization in order to promise 83 84 RATIONALITY FOR MORTALS optimal decisions. No
of the two hypotheses is accepted, and the other is rejected (in Fisher’s scheme, the null can only be rejected, not accepted). Neyman and Pearson believed that they had improved the logic of Fisher’s null hypothesis testing. Fisher (1955) did not think so. He thought that those who propose sampling randomly from a defined population and calculating sample size on the basis of cost-benefit trade-offs mistake science for quality control. He compared the Neyman-Pearsonians to Stalin’s five-year plans,
experimenter samples the variables on which participants judge objects. One is personal construct theory (Kelly, 1955). The goal of the theory is to analyze the “personal constructs” people use to understand themselves and their world. George Kelly’s emphasis on the subjective construction of the world precludes using a fixed set of variables, such as a semantic differential, and imposing it on all participants. Instead, Kelly describes methods that elicit the constructs relevant for each person.
for example, a sample of women who have positive mammograms. How many of these women actually have breast cancer? Note that numbers may vary across populations and age groups. 2. Numbers are based on Nyström et al. (1996) and differ slightly from those used in chapter 1, where they were simplified to make it easier to calculate the probability of cancer given a positive mammogram. This probability is about 1 out of 10 no matter which numbers are used. UNDERSTANDING RISKS IN HEALTH CARE Figure
