Gerd Gigerenzer

Gerd Gigerenzer is a German psychologist who has directed the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and the Harding Center for Risk Literacy. Against the view that human reasoning is riddled with biases, he argues that simple heuristics are often adaptive tools that perform well in real environments with limited time and information. His idea of ecological rationality ties good reasoning to the fit between a strategy and the structure of its environment.

Key ideas

• Heuristics are adaptive strategies, not mere defects, and can outperform complex methods under uncertainty.
• Rationality is ecological: a strategy is good relative to the structure of the environment in which it is used.
• Fast-and-frugal rules such as the recognition heuristic and take-the-best use little information yet predict well.
• Risks are understood far better when statistics are presented as natural frequencies rather than conditional probabilities.

Major works

• Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart (1999, with Peter Todd and the ABC Research Group)
• Calculated Risks (2002; UK title Reckoning with Risk)
• Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious (2007)
• Risk Savvy: How to Make Good Decisions (2014)

In the conversation

• Question Running a kitchen, I never pick the best option, just the first good one. Is that irrational? Joel D'Souza · 5 replies
• Discussion Thirty-four years of anxious calls about screening results, and base rates still trip me up Alistair Gow · 5 replies