Gerd Gigerenzer

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Gerd Gigerenzer (2014)

Gerd Gigerenzer (born September 3, 1947 in Wallersdorf ) is a German psychologist , director emeritus at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development (Department: "Adaptive Behavior and Cognition") and Director of the Harding Center for Risk Competence at the Max Planck Institute for educational research in Berlin. Gigerenzer is married to Lorraine Daston . In public he has emerged as a critic of behavioral economics , among other things .

Act

After a doctorate and habilitation in psychology at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich , he was Professor of Psychology at the University of Konstanz from 1984 to 1990 , at the University of Salzburg from 1990 to 1992 and at the University of Chicago from 1992 to 1995 . He then was director at the Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research in Munich from 1995 to 1997 before moving to the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. Until 2017 he was director of the department Adaptive Behavior and Cognition and since 2009 he has been director of the Harding Center for Risk Literacy.

Gigerenzer works on limited rationality , heuristics and efficient decision trees , i.e. on the question of how one can make rational decisions when time and information are limited and the future is uncertain (see also decision under Uncertainty ). He became known to the general public with his book “ Gut Decisions ”, which has been translated and published in 17 languages.

He is one of the supporters of the Charter of Fundamental Digital Rights of the European Union , which was published at the end of November 2016.

Gut decisions

Gigerenzer criticizes cognitive models that view the making of judgments and decisions as the result of complex unconscious processes that generate the most rational decision possible from the totality of the available information. This approach is followed by the recommendation, which can often be found in the advisory and management consulting literature, to proceed as analytically as possible when making decisions, to list advantages and disadvantages and to weigh them precisely against each other. Gigerenzer sees this as an example of a deviation from everyday decision-making, which he considers to be less than successful. Instead of such a logical- rational model of decision-making, Gigerenzer emphasizes the importance of gut instinct - decisions are therefore primarily made intuitively on the basis of rules of thumb , which are subordinated to rational decision-making strategies as a late-stage aid. According to Gigerenzer, following these gut decisions is again a rational strategy because it is relatively successful. The gut feeling should not be confused with a random inspiration or naivety: gut decisions work particularly well when they are based on specialist knowledge: Gigerenzer describes a case in which art historians were concerned about the Getty Museum's purchase of a torso . The scientific tests did not detect the forgery for the time being, later the work of art was revealed as a forgery.

"Take the best"

In the late 1990s, Gigerenzer's research group conducted an experiment with New York University students in which they were supposed to predict the winner for a random selection of games from the 1996/97 season of the National Basketball Association (NBA). The season was already over, Gigerenzer anonymized the teams and gave the students only two pointers for each game: the number of games that the two teams had won in total in each season, and the half-time result. A post-analysis showed that the approach most students used was intuitive. They followed the rule of thumb: if one team has been significantly better than the other over the entire season, it will also be the winner in this game; if the season balance of the two teams was comparable (less than 15 wins difference), the team in the lead at the break will win. The students were correct in 78% of the games. This sequential tapping of criteria in a certain 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 was previously usually interpreted as irrational behavior. However, Gigerenzer took his investigation as an opportunity to reassess the take-the-best strategy, as it was both successful and at the same time required far fewer cognitive resources than exact calculations of probabilities. Gigerenzer's research group compared Take the best with multiple regression analysis , a multi-level statistical process that is supposed to weight various criteria in an algorithmically optimal way when making a decision. On the basis of twenty problems from business, psychology, healthcare or biology, it turned out that the multiple regression analysis made correct predictions on average in 68% of the cases, but the supposedly naive take the best in 71%.

See also : take-the-best heuristic

Useful half knowledge

The hit rate of the take-the-best strategy can paradoxically be improved by leaving out information. “Good intuitions have to ignore information” ( Gigerenzer ). The paradox is explained by the fact that not all information is relevant for the forecast. Take the best is a strategy that allows certain data to be used as critical and the rest to be ignored. According to Gigerenzer, this approach contradicts a widespread but false ideal of the maximizer: “More information is always better. More time is always better. More options are always better. More calculations are always better. This scheme is deep within us, but it is wrong! What interests us as researchers is: when is 'more' better and when is 'less' better? "( Gigerenzer )

Inaccurate knowledge can also be correct. In a study he asked the question: "Which city has more inhabitants: San Diego or San Antonio?" Once German and once American students. The surprising result: the German students were able to answer the question correctly more often (San Diego) because, unlike their colleagues, they had never heard of the other city. He assumes that partially uninformed decisions are based on unconscious rules of thumb, in the present case: The well-known city is probably also the larger one. - and this often leads to success.

Monthly unstatistics

Together with the Bochum economist  Thomas K. Bauer  and the Dortmund statistician  Walter Krämer  , Gigerenzer launched the “Unstatistics of the Month” campaign in 2012. According to the initiators, the campaign should "help to deal with data and facts sensibly, to correctly interpret figures of reality and to describe an increasingly complex world and environment more meaningfully".

Memberships (selection)

Awards

Fonts

  • Measurement and Modeling in Psychology. UTB / Reinhardt, Munich / Basel 1981, ISBN 978-3-497-00895-7 .
  • Rationality for Mortals. 2008.
  • with Christoph Engel : Heuristics and the Law. 2006
  • Adaptive Thinking. 2000.
  • with PM Todd: Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart. 1999.
  • with Reinhard Selten : Bounded Rationality. 2001
  • with Daniel G. Goldstein: Models of Ecological Rationality: The Recognition Heuristic. In: Psychological Review. Vol. 109, No. 1, 2002, ISSN  0033-295X , pp. 75-90.
  • with Peter M. Todd, ABC Research Group (Ed.): Simple heuristics that make us smart. Oxford University Press, New York 1999, ISBN 0-19-514381-7 .
  • The basics of skepticism. About the correct 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, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-570-00937-6 .
  • with JA Muir Gray as editor: Better Doctors, Better Patients, Better Decisions. Envisioning Health Care 2020 . MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts 2011, ISBN 978-0-262-01603-2 .
    • German: with JA Muir Gray as editor: Better doctors, better patients, better medicine. Departure to a transparent health system. Medical Scientific Publishing Company, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-941468-82-5 .
  • Risk Savvy .
  • with Thomas K. Bauer and Walter Krämer : Why fat doesn't make you stupid and GM maize doesn't kill. About risks and side effects of the statistic . Campus Verlag, Frankfurt am Main / New York City 2014, ISBN 978-3-593-50030-0 .
  • Risk. How to make the right decisions. Translated from the English by Hainer Kober, Zeitverlag Gerd Bucerius GmbH & Co. KH, Hamburg 2016, ISBN 978-3-946456-06-3 .

See also

Web links

Video

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The fly in the toilet - and the nudges of the Chancellor zeit.de, March 10, 2015, accessed on January 15, 2020
  2. ↑ «Gut feelings are the product of simple rules of thumb . We are mostly unaware of these rules of thumb, and they are often based on a single reason. »; "Nevertheless, intuitive decisions are not only more economical and faster, but often also simply better."
  3. ↑ Lilo Berg: Gerd Gigerenzer, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, on the art of making good decisions quickly: "Even half-knowledge can lead to success". In: Berliner Zeitung. August 27, 2005.
  4. ↑ Anja Dieckmann, Gerd Gigerenzer: Does half knowledge make you smart? In: Berlin doctors. Issue 07/2005, online version (PDF; 488 kB)
  5. ^ Gerd Gigerenzer, Thomas Bauer, Walter Krämer: Unstatistics of the month. RWI Essen, accessed on November 21, 2017 .
personal data
SURNAME Gigerenzer, Gerd
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German cognitive psychologist
DATE OF BIRTH September 3, 1947
PLACE OF BIRTH Wallersdorf