有限理性

by Gerd Gigerenzer, 吉仁泽

本书是承续诺贝尔经济学奖获得者赫伯特·A.西蒙开创的有限理性观，集包括莱茵哈德·泽尔腾和弗农·L.史密斯等诺贝尔经济学获得者在内的众多当今世界上各个领域的顶级科学家的集体智慧而成的一部经典著作。

它将人类理性作为适应性思维重新思考，重在理解头脑是如何应付周围的自然和社会环境的。其独到的见解和论述将关于人类思维、人工智能、创造性及决策制定等问题的研究从一个虚无缥缈的梦幻世界迎回现实世界中来。

它是一部让人变得勇敢与睿智之作。其提出观点和假设的大胆性、论证观点和假设的严密性及驳斥相反论点的强而有力，都将给读者留下深刻的印象。书中处处闪耀着智慧和灵感的火花，读者不仅可以从中汲取到知识的营养，更重要的是可以从中学到独立思考的精神和灵活多变的思维方法！

作为一部引人入胜的跨学科著作、本书适合于对心理学、认知科学、人工智能、统计学、经济学、社会学、哲学和动物行为等研究领域感兴趣的广大读者阅读。它可以供希望在现实生活中作出良好决策的任何人作为参考。

Genres: Psychology, Economics, Philosophy, Science, Business

396 pages, Paperback

First published February 19, 2001

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

[Steven Peterson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This edited volume is an important addition to the work on human decision-making under conditions of uncertainty, in which people use "rules of thumb" to produce cost-effective decisions that are not strictly "rational." From the psychological literature, the work of Kahneman and Tversky is well know (and has been rewarded with international recognition). However, they do not explicitly link such behavior (often referred to as "heuristics") to evolution and biology. And they tend to define these "rules of thumb" as rather poor guides to decision making.

The essays in this edited volume provide a different--and more optimistic picture--of such heuristics. The contributors provide evidence and logic to suggest that evolution has led to the development of decision making shortcuts that "work" reasonably well.

One can disagree with certain aspects of this work (they may be a bit harsh on Kahneman and Tversky and their peers; they may be overly optimistic about some of the heuristics that they mention). Nonetheless, this work is a wonderful introduction to a literature on how humans actually think and decide--rather than relying on abstract conceptualizations often prevalent in the social sciences, including the simplistic "rational choice" theory ascendant in several social science disciplines. This book represents a welcome corrective to such perspectives.

[Jon Gauthier · Rating 3 out of 5]

Models of rational decision making in economics, cognitive science, biology, and other fields … tend to ignore these constraints and treat the mind as a Laplacean superintelligence equipped with unlimited resources of time, information, and computational might.

Heuristics in the adaptive toolbox are modeled on the actual cognitive abilities a species has rather than on the imaginary powers of omniscient demons.

Quite a few straight-talking articles here. Direct links to artificial intelligence, too—the founder of this school was Herbert Simon, after all.