Gigerenzer,G.

In this chapter, I will introduce you to the study of cognitive heuristics: how people actually make judgments and decisions in everyday life, generally without calculating probabilities and utilities. The term heuristic is of Greek origin and means "serving to find out or discover." In the title of his Nobel Prize-winning paper of 1905, Albert Einstein used the term heuristic to indicate an idea that he considered incomplete, due to the limits of our knowledge, but useful (Holton, 1988). For the Stanford mathematician G. Polya (1954), heuristic thinking was as indispensable as analytical thinking for problems that cannot be solved by the calculus or probability theory - for instance, how to find a mathematical proof. The advent of computer programming gave heuristics a new prominence. It became clear that most problems of any importance are computationally intractable, that is, we do not know the optimal solution, nor a method for how to find it. This holds even for well-defined problems such as chess, the classic computer game Tetris, and the traveling salesman problem (Michalewicz & Fogel, 2000). The same uncertainty holds for less well-structured problems, such as which job offer to accept, what stocks to invest in, and whom to marry. When optimal solutions are out of reach, we are not paralyzed to inaction or doomed to failure. We can use heuristics to discover good solutions. ({PsycINFO} Database Record (c) 2013 {APA}, all rights reserved)

Gigerenzer, G. (2004). Fast and frugal heuristics: The tools of bounded rationality. In D. Koehler & N. Harvey (Eds.), Blackwell handbook of judgment and decision making (pp. 62-88). Malden: Blackwell. (Full text)

Publication year	2004
Document type:	In book
Publication status:	Published
External URL:	http://library.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/ft/gg/GG_Fast_2004.pdf View
Categories:
Keywords:	bounded rationalityenvironmentsheuristicreasonsrobustness