abstract:Gerd Gigerenzer (born September 3, 1947, Wallersdorf) 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.
The answer to these puzzles, saysGerdGigerenzer, aGermanpsychologist, lies in thewaywemakedecisions, whichis not how Franklin — ormodern students ofdecisiontheory — think we should.
GerdGigerenzer, the director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, thinks that instead they should boast about using heuristics.