Message from Dean - May 8th 2007
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 153
EAN: 9780195143812
Edition: 1
ISBN: 0195143817
Label: Oxford University Press, USA
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 416
Publication Date: 2000-09
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Studio: Oxford University Press, USA
Alternate Versions: Click to Display
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart invites readers to embark on a new journey into a land of rationality that differs from the familiar territory of cognitive science and economics. Traditional views of rationality tend to see decision makers as possessing superhuman powers of reason, limitless knowledge, and all of eternity in which to ponder choices. To understand decisions in the real world, we need a different, more psychologically plausible notion of rationality, and this book provides it. It is about fast and frugal heuristics--simple rules for making decisions when time is pressing and deep thought an unaffordable luxury. These heuristics can enable both living organisms and artificial systems to make smart choices, classifications, and predictions by employing bounded rationality.
But when and how can such fast and frugal heuristics work? Can judgments based simply on one good reason be as accurate as those based on many reasons? Could less knowledge even lead to systematically better predictions than more knowledge? Simple Heuristics explores these questions, developing computational models of heuristics and testing them through experiments and analyses. It shows how fast and frugal heuristics can produce adaptive decisions in situations as varied as choosing a mate, dividing resources among offspring, predicting high school drop out rates, and playing the stock market.
As an interdisciplinary work that is both useful and engaging, this book will appeal to a wide audience. It is ideal for researchers in cognitive psychology, evolutionary psychology, and cognitive science, as well as in economics and artificial intelligence. It will also inspire anyone interested in simply making good decisions.
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
I agree with most of the other reviews that the book is well written but will likely be enjoyed only by those who are interested in a more academic approach to the subject. I am giving this book one star primarily because of the authors' decision to price the Kindle version of this book at $26.00. I ordered the book at Barnes and Noble (and read about half of it the day it came in) but held off buying it because I saw on my cell phone that a Kindle version was available. What I missed was the $26.00 purchase price. Shame on you. The whole idea of Kindle is that the author's costs are practically eliminated, and that this savings is shared with the purchaser. $26.00 is just plain greedy. This is one customer you will not be profiting from. I will finish reading the book at the library or book store.
Rating:  -
People aren't computers. Human beings live in a real world of scarcity and constraint. Even though time and information may be scarce, human beings must make high-stakes decisions. Probability and logic offer models for the thought process of choosing between alternatives, but decision makers often do not have enough hours, data and skill to use these sophisticated approaches. Fortunately, some rough and ready cognitive shortcuts perform as well as or better than the most elaborately sophisticated models - at least in the real world context of limited information and time. Working with the ABC Research Group, authors Gerd Gigerenzer and Peter M. Todd explore some of those shortcuts, called "heuristics." They discuss in length and depth a series of experiments that demonstrate the value of heuristics. This is not light reading. It requires a level of comfort with academic style, mathematics and symbolic logic. Readers unfamiliar with cognition literature may find it a struggle - but we believes ... Read More
Rating: -
Gerd Gigerenzer is probably THE guru in heuristics - the art of picking a few shorthand rules to help us make complex decisions - but I found other works of his (Adaptive Thinking, Bounded Rationality) pretty dry going. By contrast this volume - a collection of stimulating, sometimes provocative essays by members of the ABC Research group (the centrer for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition) explores many facets of Heuristics and even puts heuristics to the test against other more computationally complex techniques to pick the outcomes for several complicated problems. Time and again, the simple rules of thumb out-perform the grindingly thorough statistical routines. For anyone researching human behaviour, the implicit challenge is to stop asking huge batteries of questions - and to look instead for the little telltale rules by which people navigate their complicated environments.
I'd say that if you were just starting to look at heuristics, then this this volume of essays would be a good ... Read More
Rating: -
Whether you like a book depends on what information you're looking for. i make computer models of human behavior so this book, which is easy to read but filled with concrete solutions and lots of supporting dat, was near-perfect for me
As a note, i'm picky when it comes both to writing and thinking. And i hate most books written by academics. Even the ones with good information (eg, Fodor's Modularity) are hard to read and filled with confusing, field-specific words. Not this book. It's really well written. Written in plain English, very few assumptions, very thorough analysis, lots of self-criticism, lots and lots of data (OK, that part is boring and can be skipped, but it's comforting to know it's there)
What's it about? Common AI, psych and economic decision and learning algorithms (decision trees, neural nets, Bayes, multiple linear regression, etc.) are compared to several absurdly simple algorithms the authors believe real humans use. The various approaches are compared ... Read More
Rating: -
It's really meant for a technical audience since this stuff is so cutting edge, but you shouldn't wait till the results appear in Time magazine. The experiments and writing are very easy to understand, very clear. And you will be amazed by the simple ways in which our brain takes shortcuts in reasoning -- both making it stupid and making it smart. Be careful next time you try to reason using probabilities, you're better off using frequency.
My own background is in philosophy, where this type of work has been very important in undermining the assumption that humans are rational. We aren't. You should probably read Kahnemann and Tversky's books before coming to this though, since this work adds an interesting spin to the old irrationality debate: maybe some of it is GOOD for us!
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