Striking a Blow for Sanity in Theories of Rationality

By Gerd Gigerenzer. 2004

72 citations recorded by the source corpus.

I took the title of this chapter from an email Herbert A. Simon sent me in May 1999. In this email, he wrote a statement for the back cover of Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart in which he commented: “I think the book strikes a great blow for sanity in the approach to rationality [and shows] why more than minor tampering with existing optimization theory is called for.” But Herb wouldn’t be Herb if he hadn’t added “and you wouldn’t believe I had ever skimmed the volume if I didn’t fi nd SOMETHING to disagree with.” And so he continued, pointing out that he hadn’t found the expert/novice topic treated, that scientifi c discovery would have been a great example for ill-structured domains … Bringing sanity into theories of rationality was a major guideline in Herbert Simon’s scientifi c life. However, as he himself was prepared to admit, sanity in rationality entered his thinking as a negatively defi ned concept, a kind of black box that contained everything that was not optimization. What he opposed has various names: full rationality, substantial rationality, maximization of expected utility, Homo economicus, or simply optimization. What he proposed had its seeds in his revised dissertation, Administrative Behavior (1947), and eventually became termed bounded rationality, satisfi cing, or procedural rationality. Because of its initial vague defi nition, bounded rationality, however, came to mean many things to many people.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, General Decision Sciences, History and Philosophy of Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/83165d8e110afbfb3cc54751f86eaca6c8ca9c4c

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Citations in the corpus

Bounded Rationality, Standard Form Contracts, and Unconscionability (2003, unknown): “See Gerd Gigerenzer, Peter M. Todd, and the ABC Research Group, Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart (Oxford 1999). 1 l See Cass R. Sunstein, Probability Neglect: Emotions, Worst Cases, and Law, 112 Yale L J 61,74 (2002). 112 Gary H. McClelland, William D. Schulze, and Don L. Coursey, Insurance for ”
Some models and measures for evaluating performances with DEA: past accomplishments and future prospects (2007, unknown): “See Gigerenzer (2004).”
Bounding rationality to the world (2003, background): “As a consequence, this interpretation of his idea of bounded rationality is one that he spoke against ( Gigerenzer, in press ).”
Predicting Wimbledon 2005 tennis results by mere player name recognition (2007, unknown): “Past research on fast and frugal heuristics illustrates that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the reduction of model complexity and the amount of information utilized need not be a disadvantage (Gigerenzer et al., 1999; Gigerenzer, 2004).”
Dual Process Theories in Behavioral Economics and Neuroeconomics: a Critical Review (2019, background): “…not the sole cause of reasoning errors (viz. because System 2 is sometimes involved), proponents of “ecological rationality” (Gigerenzer et al. 1999; Gigerenzer 2004, 2007, 2008; Gigerenzer and Brighton 2009) argue that it is inappropriate to presume that rationality is constituted by the norms…”