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Book Description
Where do new ideas come from? What is social intelligence? Why do social scientists perform mindless
statistical rituals? This vital book is about rethinking rationality as adaptive thinking: to understand how minds cope with
their environments, both ecological and social. Gerd Gigerenzer proposes and illustrates a bold new research program that
investigates the psychology of rationality, introducing the concepts of ecological, bounded, and social rationality. His path-breaking
collection takes research on thinking, social intelligence, creativity, and decision-making out of an ethereal world where
the laws of logic and probability reign, and places it into our real world of human behavior and interaction. Adaptive Thinking
is accessibly written for general readers with an interest in psychology, cognitive science, economics, sociology, philosophy,
artificial intelligence, and animal behavior.
Gigerenzer's main thrust is that humans did not evolve in the psychology laboratory, with good command of probability
theory to help them work on word problems. Instead, he argues, humans evolved in environments with lots of noise, and had
to use regular features of the world to develop simple and effective rules of action. In this, he echoes and extends the work
by economist Herbert Simon in the 1950s. - James Daniels
[Gigerenzer's] project has the potential to become a truly revolutionary approach to rationality. Gigerenzer is
not alone in urging us to take seriously the adaptive nature of human reasoning, but he is one of the few who has the courage
to envisage an entire new framework. He argues persuasively that we should be looking for normative standards of human reasoning
that are shaped by the relation between the mind and the environment, and reflect the only kind of rationality that matters
to us, the rationality that allows limited systems to control a complex and ever-changing world. What these standards exactly
are, and why they play a normative role, are questions yet to be answered. - Lisa Bortolotti, Philosophy Program, RSSS, Coombs
Building, ANU, Canberra ACT 0200, Australia.
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p.57 Ecological rationality refers to the study of how
cognitive strategies exploit the representation and structure of information in the environment to make reasonable judgments
and decisions. The importance of studying the link between mind and its environment was emphasized by Egon Brunswik,
who compared mind and environment to two married people who have to come to terms with each other by mutual adaptation...
More recently, Roger Shepard (1990, p.213) expressed the same insight: "We may look into that window [on the mind] as
through a glass darkly, but what we are beginning to discern there looks very much like a reflection of the world."
p.111 To understand the power of human intelligence, one needs to analyze the match between cognitive
strategies and the structure of environments. Together they are like a pair of scissors, each blade of little use on its own
but effective in concert with the other... How do people make decisions in the real world, where time is short, knowledge
lacking, and other resources limited? ...By analyzing the match between heuristic and environment, we can predict how fast,
frugal, and accurate a heuristic will be.
p.168 What are these simple, intelligent heuristics capable of making near-optimal inferences? How fast
and accurate are they? In this chapter, we propose a class of heuristics that exhibit bounded rationality in both of [American
social scientist Herbert] Simon's senses. These "fast and frugal heuristics" operate with simple psychological principles
that satisfy the constraints of limited time, knowledge, and computational might, rather than those of classical rationality.
At the same time, they are designed to be fast and frugal without a significant loss of inferential accuracy, because they
can exploit the structure of environments.
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