Simply Rational: Decision Making in the Real World

by Gerd Gigerenzer

Statistical illiteracy can have an enormously negative impact on decision making. This volume of collected papers brings together applied and theoretical research on risks and decision making across the fields of medicine, psychology, and economics. Collectively, the essays demonstrate why the frame in which statistics are communicated is essential for broader understanding and sound decision making, and that understanding risks and uncertainty has wide-reaching implications for daily life. Gerd Gigerenzer provides a lucid review and catalog of concrete instances of heuristics, or rules of thumb, that people and animals rely on to make decisions under uncertainty, explaining why these are very often more rational than probability models. After a critical look at behavioral theories that do not model actual psychological processes, the book concludes with a call for a "heuristic revolution" that will enable us to understand the ecological rationality of both statistics and
heuristics, and bring a dose of sanity to the study of rationality.

Genres: Psychology

326 pages, Hardcover

First published February 24, 2015

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

[Usfromdk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oxford University Press' Evolution and Cognition series is, judging from the books in the series which I've read so far, a collection of simply excellent books, and this book will not be the last book in this series which I'll read. Boyd and Richerson's book was amazing, and some of the chapters in this book by Gigerenzer are brilliant.

The main focus of this review will be to provide the reasons for why I did not give the book five stars - that this is the starting point should be kept in mind in the following. One of the main reasons why the book did not get five stars is that I did not particularly like the longish volleyball-related chapter in the middle. As Gigerenzer puts it towards the end of that chapter: "In this article we showed that the hot hand as well as the belief in it exists in volleyball. One may ask why this result is of any importance." Now, I did ask myself that question, and similar questions along the way while reading the chapter, and I don't think he gave a satisfactory answer - despite the obvious conceptual links which might be drawn to the material covered in other chapters in the book, to me that chapter nevertheless felt somewhat irrelevant, unjustified, and a bit out of place. A less important reason which however also contributed was that I also didn't think too highly of the stereotype chapter which followed the aforementioned chapter. I should point out that I don't think it was a particularly bad chapter, it just was not particularly interesting to because I didn't really care very much about that research. A third minor point of criticism is that I once or twice felt along the way that Gigerenzer was a bit too quick to draw conclusions from one study or a small number of studies which fit in well with 'his narrative'.

Quite a bit of the rest of the stuff in the book was pure 'five-star stuff', so all in all I was much closer to five stars than three. There's some great stuff in this book, and I'm pretty close to saying that some of this stuff should be mandatory reading for people in the social sciences (especially people in the fields of psychology and economics) and the medical sciences. There are a lot of really nice ideas and arguments in this book (for example: 'there are good and bad ways to present and talk about data - use frequency statements when dealing with medical statistics'/'less is sometimes more'/'the environments in which we find ourselves matter in terms of which decision-making approaches are likely to be optimal, and we should try to figure out under which conditions which decision-making processes lead to desirable outcomes'/'theory integration would be desirable in the field of psychology'/'focus on prediction rather than fit'/'compare model performances'/'a lot of 'behavioural economics' seems to be just like classical economics, only with extra free parameters added to the mix'/criticism of dual-system/dual-process theories in psychology, etc. - if you want details, read the book...), which a lot of people would do well to familiarize themselves with.