Five Principles for Studying People’s Use of Heuristics

Abstract

Abstract:The fast and frugal heuristics framework assumes that people rely on an adaptive toolbox of simple decision strategies-called heuristics-to make inferences, choices, estimations, and other decisions. Each of these heuristics is tuned to regularities in the structure of the task environment and each is capable of exploiting the ways in which basic cognitive capacities work. In doing so, heuristics enable adaptive behavior. In this article, we give an overview of the framework and formulate five principles that should guide the study of people's adaptive toolbox. We emphasize that models of heuristics should be (i) precisely defined; (ii) tested comparatively; (iii) studied in line with theories of strategy selection; (iv) evaluated by how well they predict new data; and (vi) tested in the real world in addition to the laboratory. Key words: fast and frugal heuristics; experimental design; model testing As we write this article, international financial markets are in turmoil. Large banks are going bankrupt almost daily. It is a difficult situation for financial decision makers -regardless of whether they are lay investors trying to make small-scale profits here and there or professionals employed by the finance industry. To safeguard their investments, these decision makers need to be able to foresee uncertain future economic developments, such as which investments are likely to be the safest and which companies are likely to crash next. In times of rapid waves of potentially devastating financial crashes, these informed bets must often be made quickly, with little time for extensive information search or computationally demanding calculations of likely future returns. Lay stock traders in particular have to trust the contents of their memories, relying on incomplete, imperfect Humans are not omniscient. We do not come equipped with the ability to run computationally demanding calculations quickly in our heads. Rather, we make decisions under the constraints of limited information processing capacity, knowledge, and time -be they about the likely performance of stocks, which movie to see at the multiplex, whom to match up with in a speed-dating session, or whether to hospitalize a patient who has registered at the emergency room reception. According to the fast and frugal heuristics research program (for recent reviews, see Gigerenzer & Brighton, 2009; press a), humans can nevertheless make such decisions successfully because they can rely on a repertoire of simple decision strategies, or heuristics. These simple rules of thumb can often perform well even under the constraints of limited knowledge, time, and information-processing capacity. They do so by exploiting the structure of information in the environment in which a decision maker acts and by building on the ways cognitive capacities work, such as the speed with which the human memory system retrieves information. Together, these simple rules of thumb form an adaptive toolbox of

From recognition to decisions: Extending and testing recognition-based models for multialternative inference

“…However, such conclusions require further tests, for three reasons (see also Marewski, Schooler, & Gigerenzer, 2010). First, most studies that provided evidence against the noncompensatory processing of recognition reported group means, rather than individual participants' data; yet a number of experiments have indicated that there may be strong individual differences in people's treatment of recognition that would be hidden by group means.…”

Individual differences in theory-of-mind judgments: Order effects and side effects

“…A more complete understanding of judgment dynamics requires the investigation of the proximal cognitive mechanisms and considering the influence of person, process, and environment. Because individual differences cannot necessarily tell us what the proximal causal processes are, and because many interesting phenomena are multiply determined, studies of individual differences may be particularly useful when used in concert with experimental methods (Cokely & Feltz, 2009b;Cronbach, 1957; for related arguments see Gigerenzer & Brighton, 2009;Marewski & Olsson, 2009;Marewski, Schooler, & Gigerenzer, 2010). Using what we know about differences can help inform new hypotheses and tests that can then be used to motivate experimental design.…”

Strategy selection: An introduction to the modeling challenge

“…The latter explanation warrants rejecting the model of that strategy and developing a new model. The researcher's methodological dilemma consists in disentangling these explanations—a tricky enterprise …”

“…In situations of flat maxima, more than one strategy results in equally adaptive behavior so that it matters little which strategy is employed—applying any of them would yield efficient (e.g., fast, effortless, and accurate) decisions. Correspondingly, people's use of different strategies might show the greatest variability in such situations, with, perhaps, personality‐based or even random strategy choice playing a greater role in strategy selection than in other situations …”

“…The researcher's methodological dilemma consists in disentangling these explanations-a tricky enterprise. 41…”