Naive and Yet Enlightened: From Natural Frequencies to Fast and Frugal Decision Trees

By Laura Martignon, O. Vitouch, Masanori Takezawa, Malcolm R. Forster. 2003

120 citations recorded by the source corpus.

An evolutionary view of rationality as an adaptive toolbox of fast and frugal heuristics is sometimes placed in opposition to probability as the ideal of enlightened rational human inference. Indeed, this opposition has become the cornerstone of an ongoing debate between adherents to theories of normative as opposed to bounded rationality. On the one hand, it has been shown that probability provides a good approximation to human cognitive processing for tasks involving simple inferences, and humans actually are able to reason the Bayesian way when information is presented in formats to which they are well adapted (Gigerenzer & Hoffrage, 1995). On the other hand, it is clear that probabilistic inference becomes infeasible when the mind has to deal with too many pieces of information at once. Coping with resource limitations, the mind—as Gigerenzer, Todd and the ABC Research Group (1999) claim— adopts simple inference heuristics, often based on just one-reason decision making. Our aim is to present a unifying framework, based on the systematic use of trees for knowledge representation, both for fully Bayesian and for fast and frugal decisions.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, General Decision Sciences

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d99a7c3320b91bd9b654c7ef4eea268e06e449aa

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Citations in the corpus

Identity, Power, and Threat Perception (2007, background): “This type of decision-making heuristic is referred to as a ‘‘fast and frugal decision tree’’ (see Martignon et al. 2003).”
Rationality for Mortals: How People Cope with Uncertainty (2008, background): “The heuristic is called a fast and frugal tree, and it has M + 1 exits (where M is the number of binary cues, in the present case: three), whereas a full decision tree has 2M exits (chap. 2; Martignon et al., 2003).”
Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious (2007, unknown): “For details, see Martignon et al., 2003.”
Nudge Versus Boost: How Coherent are Policy and Theory? (2015, background): “These include fast-and-frugal trees (FFT), a special kind of decision tree with at least one end node after each decision node (e.g., Martignon et al. 2003, 2008).”
Why Heuristics Work (2008, background): “Pleskac (2007) investigated the recognition heuristic from the perspective of signal-detection theory and derived how false recognition, such as déjà vu, influences the performance of the heuristic.”