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Putting naturalistic decision making into the adaptive toolbox
Author(s) -
Todd Peter M.,
Gigerenzer Gerd
Publication year - 2001
Publication title -
journal of behavioral decision making
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.136
H-Index - 76
eISSN - 1099-0771
pISSN - 0894-3257
DOI - 10.1002/bdm.396
Subject(s) - naturalism , cognition , planck , toolbox , cognitive science , citation , psychology , computer science , cognitive psychology , epistemology , philosophy , library science , physics , programming language , quantum mechanics , neuroscience
Naturalistic decision making (NDM) falls clearly within the realm of bounded rationality—the art of mak- ing decisions with limited time, knowledge, and other resources. Herbert Simon, known as the father of bounded rationality, once illustrated its logic with the image of a pair of scissors whose blades are cognitive heuristics and the structure of environments. Th e study of bounded rationality is accordingly the analysis of the heuristics people use, the analysis of the structures of environments in which people make decisions, and the match between the two. We have called the degree to which this match exists the "ecological rationality" of a heuristic, that is, the degree to which it can exploit the structure of information in its environment (Gigerenzer et al., 1999). Th ere are strong parallels between our research program on ecological rationality and that of NDM, such as the focus in both on simple decision-making heuristics that are task-specifi c rather than general-purpose and computationally fast and frugal rather than optimizing. Work in NDM has already expanded our understanding of these components of the "adaptive toolbox" of human decision mechanisms (Todd et al., 2000). In this comment, we highlight how the ecological rationality perspective can help strengthen NDM research in turn.