Within-person adaptivity in frugal judgments from memory

Filevich, Elisa; Horn, Sebastian; Kühn, Simone

doi:10.1007/s00426-017-0962-7

Cited by 6 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 59 publications

(94 reference statements)

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“…The reason is that heuristics depend on a single or a few decision-making variables (cues), thus becoming less vulnerable to variance relative to logical and probabilistic calculations that take many variables into consideration. The elegance of heuristic decision-making is that salient cues are intuitively recognized by the decision-maker ( Filevich et al, 2017 ). However, under extreme uncertainty, heuristics would be as error-prone as random guesses since the salient cues are not perceived by the decision-maker.…”

Section: Extreme Uncertainty and Adaptiveness Of Eristic Reasoningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Eristic reasoning: Adaptation to extreme uncertainty

Kurdoglu

Ateş²

2023

Front. Psychol.

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Heuristics (shortcut solution rules) can help adaptation to uncertainty by leading to sufficiently accurate decisions with little information. However, heuristics would fail under extreme uncertainty where information is so scarce that any heuristic would be highly misleading for accuracy-seeking. Thus, under very high levels of uncertainty, decision-makers rely on heuristics to no avail. We posit that eristic reasoning (i.e., self-serving inferences for hedonic pursuits), rather than heuristic reasoning, is adaptive when uncertainty is extreme, as eristic reasoning produces instant hedonic gratifications helpful for coping. Eristic reasoning aims at hedonic gains (e.g., relief from the anxiety of uncertainty) that can be pursued by self-serving inferences. As such, eristic reasoning does not require any information about the environment as it instead gets cues introspectively from bodily signals informing what the organism hedonically needs as shaped by individual differences. We explain how decision-makers can benefit from heuristic vs. eristic reasoning under different levels of uncertainty. As a result, by integrating the outputs of formerly published empirical research and our conceptual discussions pertaining to eristic reasoning, we conceptually criticize the fast-and-frugal heuristics approach, which implies that heuristics are the only means of adapting to uncertainty.

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Section: Extreme Uncertainty and Adaptiveness Of Eristic Reasoningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Eristic reasoning: Adaptation to extreme uncertainty

Kurdoglu

Ateş²

2023

Front. Psychol.

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“…The city size task is a useful example as it is the focal experiment of the most highly cited academic article in the ecological rationality literature ( Gigerenzer and Goldstein, 1996 ) and also extensively discussed in highly cited books (e.g., Gigerenzer and Todd, 1999 ). Furthermore, variants of the city size experiment have been done across numerous different contexts over the past three decades, published in various top psychology and cognitive science outlets (e.g., Gigerenzer et al, 1991 ; Goldstein and Gigerenzer, 2002 ; Chater et al, 2003 ; Schooler and Hertwig, 2005 ; Pohl, 2006 ; Richter and Späth, 2006 ; Dougherty et al, 2008 ; Gigerenzer and Brighton, 2009 ; Marewski et al, 2010 ; Hoffrage, 2011 ; Pachur et al, 2011 ; Heck and Erdfelder, 2017 ; Filevich et al, 2019 ). The city size experiment has also been highlighted as an example of different heuristics, including the recognition heuristic, as well as the less-is-more, tally, and take-the-best heuristics ( Goldstein and Gigerenzer, 2008 ).…”

Section: Cues and Environments: Two Problemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Generative View of Rationality and Growing Awareness†

Felin

Koenderink

2022

Front. Psychol.

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In this paper we contrast bounded and ecological rationality with a proposed alternative, generative rationality. Ecological approaches to rationality build on the idea of humans as “intuitive statisticians” while we argue for a more generative conception of humans as “probing organisms.” We first highlight how ecological rationality’s focus on cues and statistics is problematic for two reasons: (a) the problem of cue salience, and (b) the problem of cue uncertainty. We highlight these problems by revisiting the statistical and cue-based logic that underlies ecological rationality, which originate from the misapplication of concepts in psychophysics (e.g., signal detection, just-noticeable-differences). We then work through the most popular experimental task in the ecological rationality literature—the city size task—to illustrate how psychophysical assumptions have informally been linked to ecological rationality. After highlighting these problems, we contrast ecological rationality with a proposed alternative, generative rationality. Generative rationality builds on biology—in contrast to ecological rationality’s focus on statistics. We argue that in uncertain environments cues are rarely given or available for statistical processing. Therefore we focus on the psychogenesis of awareness rather than psychophysics of cues. For any agent or organism, environments “teem” with indefinite cues, meanings and potential objects, the salience or relevance of which is scarcely obvious based on their statistical or physical properties. We focus on organism-specificity and the organism-directed probing that shapes awareness and perception. Cues in teeming environments are noticed when they serve as cues-for-something, requiring what might be called a “cue-to-clue” transformation. In this sense, awareness toward a cue or cues is actively “grown.” We thus argue that perception might more productively be seen as the presentation of cues and objects rather than their representation. This generative approach not only applies to relatively mundane organism (including human) interactions with their environments—as well as organism-object relationships and their embodied nature—but also has significant implications for understanding the emergence of novelty in economic settings. We conclude with a discussion of how our arguments link with—but modify—Herbert Simon’s popular “scissors” metaphor, as it applies to bounded rationality and its implications for decision making in uncertain, teeming environments.

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“…The city-size task is a useful example as it is the focal experiment of the most highly cited academic article in the ecological rationality literature and also extensively discussed in highly-cited books (e.g., Gigerenzer and Todd, 1999). Furthermore, variants of the city-size experiment have been done across numerous different contexts over the past three decades, published in various top psychology and cognitive science outlets (e.g., Chater et al, 2003;Dougherty et al, 2008;Filevich et al, 2019;Gigerenzer et al, 1991;Gigerenzer and Brighton, 2009;Goldstein and Gigerenzer, 1998;2006;Heck and Erdfelder, 2017;Hoffrage, 1995Hoffrage, , 2011Marewski et al, 2010;Pohl, 2006;Richter and Späth, 2006;Schooler and Hertwig, 2005). The city-size experiment has also been highlighted as an example of different heuristics, including the recognition heuristic, as well as the less-is-more, tally, and take-the-best heuristics (Goldstein and Gigerenzer, 2008).…”

Section: The Problem Of Cues and Uncertaintymentioning

confidence: 99%

Generative Rationality

Felin¹

2021

Preprint

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In this paper we contrast bounded and ecological rationality with a proposed alternative, generative rationality. Ecological approaches to rationality build on the idea of humans as “intuitive statisticians” while we argue for a more generative conception of humans as “probing organisms.” We first highlight how ecological rationality’s focus on cues and statistics is problematic for two reasons: (a) the problem of cue salience, and (b) the problem of cue novelty in teeming environments. We highlight these problems by revisiting the statistical and cue-based logic that underlies ecological rationality, by discussing its origins in the field of psychophysics (e.g., signal detection, just-noticeable-differences). We work through the most popular experiment in the ecological rationality literature—the city-size task—to illustrate how psychophysical assumptions have been linked to ecological rationality. After highlighting these problems, we contrast ecological rationality with a proposed alternative, generative rationality. Generative rationality builds on biology, in contrast to ecological rationality’s focus on statistics. We argue that in uncertain environments cues are rarely given and available for statistical processing. Environments “teem” with indefinite cues, meanings and potential objects, the salience or relevance of which is scarcely obvious based on their statistical or physical properties. We focus on organism-specificity and organism-directed probing that shapes perception and judgment. Generative rationality departs from existing bounded and ecological approaches in that cue salience is given by top-down factors rather than the bottom-up, statistical or physical properties. A central premise of generative rationality is that cues in teeming environments are noticed or recognized when they serve as cues-for-something, requiring what might be called a “cue-to-clue” transformation. Awareness toward relevant cues needs to be actively cultivated or “grown.” Thus we argue that perception might more productively be seen as the presentation of cues and objects rather than their representation. The generative approach not only applies to seemingly mundane organism (including human) interactions with their environments—as well as organism-object relationships and their embodied nature—but also has significant implications for understanding the emergence of novelty in economic and other uncertain settings. We conclude with a discussion of how our arguments link with—but modify—Herbert Simon’s popular “scissor” metaphor, as it applies to bounded rationality and its implications for decision making in uncertain, teeming environments.

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Within-person adaptivity in frugal judgments from memory

Cited by 6 publications

References 59 publications

Eristic reasoning: Adaptation to extreme uncertainty

Eristic reasoning: Adaptation to extreme uncertainty

A Generative View of Rationality and Growing Awareness†

Generative Rationality

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