Gerd Gigerenzer
Gerd Gigerenzer ( born September 3, 1947 in Waller Village ) is a German psychologist, director of " Adaptive Behavior and Cognition " and director of the Harding Center for Risk Literacy, both at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.
Life
Gigerenzer is married to Lorraine Daston.
Work
After PhD and Habilitation in Psychology at the Ludwig- Maximilians- University of Munich from 1984 to 1990 he was professor of psychology at the University of Konstanz, from 1990 to 1992 at the University of Salzburg and from 1992 to 1995 at the University of Chicago. Subsequently, he was from 1995 to 1997 director of the Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research in Munich, before he moved to the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. Here he is Director of the Department " Adaptive Behavior and Cognition ", and was founded in 2009 Harding Center for Risk Literacy.
Gigerenzer works on bounded rationality, heuristics and simple decision trees, that is the question how to make rational decisions when time and information is limited and the future is uncertain (see also decision under uncertainty ). The general public, he has become with his book Gut Feelings, known; This book has been translated and published in 17 languages.
Gut Feelings
Gigerenzer criticized cognitive models that consider the cases of judgments and decisions as the result of unconscious complex algorithms that calculate a rational decision as possible from all of the available information. This approach follows the often to be found in the advisory and business consulting literature recommendation to proceed analytically as possible in decision-making, list pros and cons and weigh-up against each other. Gigerenzer sees but as an example of a deviation from the everyday decision-making, which he finds little success. In place of such a logical- rational model of decision-making Gigerenzer emphasized the importance of gut feeling - Decisions are therefore mainly based on intuitive hit by rules of thumb, which the rational decision-making strategies are subordinate as late aids. Following these decisions belly is by Gigerenzer itself be a rational strategy, since it is relatively successful. The gut feeling must not be confused with a random inspiration or naiveté work particularly well gut decisions, if they are based on expertise: Gigerenzer describes a case where art historians were concerned about the purchase of a torso by the Getty Museum. The scientific tests did not recognize the forgery for the time being, and later the artwork was revealed as a fake.
"Take the best"
In the late 1990s Gigerenzers led research group with students from the New York University conducted an experiment in which this was a random selection of games of the 1996/97 season of the National Basketball Association (NBA) should predict the winner. The season was already over, Gigerenzer anonymous teams and gave the students of each batch only two notes: the number of games that had won a total of each in the season, the two teams, and the half-time. Subsequent analysis revealed an intuitive approach of most students. They followed the rule of thumb: If a team throughout the season was significantly better than the other, it will be the winner in this game; when the season performances of the two teams was comparable (less than 15 victories difference), the team located the break in the lead will win. The students were correct in 78% of games. This sequential tapping of criteria in a specific order is called Take the best and follows a so-called "simple decision tree " Take the best criterion and decide - if there is no relevant difference, take the second best, and so on. Such an approach has previously been mostly interpreted as irrational behavior. Gigerenzer took his investigation, however, the occasion, the take- the-best strategy to re-evaluate, as it was both successful and at the same time far less cognitive resources claimed as exact calculations of probabilities. Gigerenzers Research Group Take the best compared with the multiple regression analysis, a multilevel statistical methods, should be weighted algorithmically optimal at a decision, the various criteria. On the basis of twenty problems from economics, psychology, public health or biology turned out that the multiple regression analysis met correct predictions on average in 68% of cases, the supposedly naive Take the best, however, at 71 %.
Useful punditry
The hit rate of take- the-best strategy can be improved, paradoxically, by the omission of information.
" Good intuitions must ignore information " ( Gigerenzer ).
The paradox is explained by the fact that not all information is relevant for prediction.
Take the best is a strategy that allows you to use certain data to be decisive and to ignore the rest.
This approach contradicts Gigerenzer a widespread but false ideal of maximizers: "More information is always better.
More time is always better.
More options are always better.
More calculations are always better.
This scheme is deep inside of us, but it is wrong!
What interested us as researchers is: when is
An inaccurate knowledge can also be right. In one study, he asked the question: " Which city has more inhabitants: San Diego or San Antonio? " Once German, once U.S. students. The surprising result: the German students were able to correctly answer the question more often (San Diego ), because they had never heard of the other city, in contrast to their colleagues. It assumes that some uninformed decisions based on unconscious rules of thumb, in the present case: the famous town is probably the larger ones. - And this often leads to success.
Memberships (Selection)
- Berlin- Brandenburg Academy of Sciences
- Cognitive Science Society ( Fellow )
- Leopoldina
Awards
Writings
- Rationality for Mortals (2008)
- Heuristics and the Law (2006, with Christoph Engel )
- Adaptive Thinking (2000)
- Bounded Rationality (2001, with Reinhard Selten )
- ( with Daniel G. Goldstein ): Models of Ecological Rationality: The Recognition Heuristic. In: Psychological Review. Vol 109, no. 1, 2002, ISSN 0033- 295x, 75-90.
- The ABC of skepticism. About the proper handling of numbers and risks. Berlin Verlag, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-8270-0079-3
- Gut decisions. The intelligence of the unconscious and the power of intuition. Bertelsmann, München 2007, ISBN 978-3-570-00937-6 (English: Gut Feelings Viking, New York 2007, ISBN 978-0-670-03863-3 ).
- ( with JA Muir Gray as eds.): Better Doctors, Better Patients, Better Decisions. Envisioning Health Care 2020, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts ISBN 978-0-262-01603-2 2011, German. ( With JA Muir Gray as eds.): Better doctors, better patients, better medicine. Dawn of a transparent health care system. Medical Scientific Publishing Company, Berlin 2013 ISBN 978-3-941468-82-5.
- Risk Savvy. (...) German: risk. How do you make the right decisions. C. Bertelsmann Verlag, Munich, 2013, ISBN 978-3-570-10103-2.