Jenny,M.A.

An evolutionary view of rationality as an adaptive toolbox of fast and frugal heuristics is sometimes placed in opposition to probability as the ideal of enlightened rational human inference. Indeed, this opposition has become the cornerstone of an ongoing debate between adherents to theories of normative as opposed to bounded rationality. On the one hand, it has been shown that probability provides a good approximation to human cognitive processing for tasks involving simple inferences, and humans actually are able to reason the Bayesian way when information is presented in formats to which they are well adapted (Gigerenzer & Hoffrage, 1995). On the other hand, it is clear that probabilistic inference becomes infeasible when the mind has to deal with too many pieces of information at once. Coping with resource limitations, the mind—as Gigerenzer, Todd and the ABC Research Group (1999) claim— adopts simple inference heuristics, often based on just one-reason decision making. Our aim is to present a unifying framework, based on the systematic use of trees for knowledge representation, both for fully Bayesian and for fast and frugal decisions.

Jenny, M. A. (2015). Fast and frugal decision trees. In M. Altman (Ed.), Real-world decision making: An encyclopedia of behavioral economics (pp. 152-154). Greenwood: ABC-CLIO.

Publication year	2015
Document type:	In book
Publication status:	Published
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Keywords:	enlightened rational human inferencenatural frequency treesradical pruning