More Is Not Always Better: The Benefits of Cognitive Limits

By Ralph Hertwig, Peter M. Todd. 2003

142 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Neuroscience, General Decision Sciences

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3527d3bb1b426838b083b7aec2ad44fa85795e90

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Citations in the corpus

Ignoring information in binary choice with continuous variables: When is less “more”? (2005, background): “This paper adds to the growing literature suggesting that, in many cases, ‘‘less is more’’ (see, e.g., Hertwig & Todd, 2003).”
Why Heuristics Work (2008, background): “Formal models help to identify the class of problems in which more information and processing pays or those in which ignoring or forgetting information is successful.”
Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious (2007, background): “On less is more, see Hertwig and Todd, 2003.”
Escaping the tyranny of choice: when fewer attributes make choice easier (2007, background): “information is not always better” (see Hertwig and Todd, 2003 ), such that consumers can”
Fast and frugal heuristics: Tools of social rationality. (2009, unknown): “Such substantial correlations exist in competitive situations, including the excellence of colleges (e.g., Hertwig & Todd, 2003), the quality of athletes (e.g., Pachur & Biele, 2007; Serwe & Frings, 2006), and the size of cities (e.g., Goldstein & Gigerenzer, 2002; Hertwig, Herzog, Schooler, &…”
The New C Standard (Excerpted material) An Economic and Cultural Commentary (2008, unknown): “some of these so-called cognitive limitations provide near optimal solutions for some real-world problems.[169] The ability to read, write, and perform complex mathematical reasoning are very recent (compared to several million years of evolution) cognitive skill requirements.”
Rationality for Mortals: How People Cope with Uncertainty (2008, background): “Built-in limitations can in fact be benefi cial, enabling new functions that would be absent without them (Hertwig & Todd, 2003).”
Connectionist models of cognitive development: where next? (2005, background): “In these models, the advantages of a critical period for language learning result – counterintuitively – from processing limitations that occur in early childhood (see also [13, 14 ] for related accounts).”
Predicting Wimbledon 2005 tennis results by mere player name recognition (2007, unknown): “…Goldstein, Ortmann, & Gigerenzer, 1999; but see Boyd, 2001, for a bear market), predicting record sales of pop stars (Herzog, 2005), the quality of American colleges (Hertwig & Todd, 2003), and the results of political elections (Marewski, Gaissmaier, Dieckmann, Schooler, & Gigerenzer, 2005).”
Homo Heuristicus: Why Biased Minds Make Better Inferences (2009, background): “For instance, in the (finitely repeated) prisoners’ dilemma, two ‘‘irrational’’ players who play tit-for-tat can make more money than do two rational players who reason by backward induction and both defect (for an overview, see Hertwig & Todd, 2003; and Gigerenzer, 2007, 2008).”
Bounding rationality to the world (2003, background): “But more than this, there are cases where cognitive limitations actually seem to be beneficial, enabling new functions that would be absent without them, rather than constraining the possible behaviors of the system (see Hertwig & Todd, in press, for a detailed account).”
A Cognition-based View of Decision Processes in Complex Social–Ecological Systems (2007, background): “Hertwig and Todd (2003) point out that humans are uniquely able to set aside mental shortcuts and engage in extensive cognition, calculation, and planning.”
When less is more (2004, background): “In contrast to Borges’ story, a long tradition in psychology has assumed that possessing more information is necessarily preferable to having less information (Hertwig & Todd, 2003).”
Adaptive rationality: An evolutionary perspective on cognitive bias (2009, unknown): “The rather small nat ural limit in our working memory capacity, for instance, facilitates the detection of correlation coefficients in small samples as the working memory imposes valuable constraints on the size of the information sample we take into account (Hertwig & Todd, 2003; Kareev 2000).”
The illusion of knowledge: When more information reduces accuracy and increases confidence (2007, result): “In contrast, a number of recent studies have emphasized the positive effects of not having knowledge on decisions (Gigerenzer et al., 1999; Goldstein & Gigerenzer, 2002; Hertwig & Todd, 2003; Schooler & Hertwig, 2005).”
Why recognition is rational: Optimality results on single-variable decision rules (2010, background): “In contrast to the conditions identified in Hogarth and Karelaia (2005) and Fasolo et al.”