Gut Feelings by Gerd Gigerenzer

Gut Feelings by Gerd Gigerenzer

Author:Gerd Gigerenzer
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub
Tags: Science, Psychology, Non-fiction
ISBN: 9781101202418
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)
Published: 2007-07-01T00:00:00+00:00


Since the first reason already allows for a decision, the search for further information is stopped, all other potential reasons are ignored, and the parents go for alternative A. On another night, the choice may be more complicated:

In the second situation, neither the first nor the second reason allows for a decision. The third one does, and the parents therefore go for alternative D, using the Take the Best heuristic, which we encountered in the context of predicting dropout rates in high schools. It consists of three building blocks:

Search rule: Look up reasons in the order of importance.

Stopping rule: Stop search as soon as the alternatives for one reason differ.

Decision rule: Choose the alternative that this reason suggests.

This process is also described as lexicographic—when one looks up words in a lexicon, one has to look up the first letter first, then the second, and so on. Dozens of experimental studies have shown that people’s judgments tend to follow Take the Best, and identified conditions where this likely happens.18 Intuitions that rely on Take the Best may need to search through several reasons, but finally rely on just one to make the decision.

To now, we have seen how parents made this important decision, but we do not know how good their preferences would be. Many authorities on rational decision making would be appalled to hear how these parents dealt with such a life-and-death issue, given their low esteem of lexicographic rules such as Take the Best:

We examine an approach that we believe is more widely adopted in practice than it deserves to be: lexicographical ordering. However, it is simple and it can easily be administered. Our objection is that it is naively simple…. Again, we feel that such an ordering procedure, if carefully scrutinized, will rarely pass a test of “reasonableness.”19

This message is from two eminent figures in rational decision making, who seemed so sure about their verdict that they did not bother to conduct the test themselves. In order to test how “reasonable” sequential decision making is, we need to look at a situation where a clear-cut outcome exists. What would be better than sports?



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