University of California, San Diego
The Department of Psychology is Honored
to Present a Talk by
Ralph Hertwig
University of Basel
"Cognitive Resources: How Less Can Be More"
To be presented on May 22, at 4:00 pm.
Location: The Crick Conference Room
Mandler Hall, room 3545
- Many models of rational inference implicitly or explicitly endow the human mind with godlike powers of reason, boundless knowledge, and all eternity to make decisions. Challenging this tradition, Herbert Simon called for models of human judgment and decision making that take account of the limited time, knowledge, and computational power available to inference makers. In various research programs developed since then, the limits on human information processing emphasized in Simon's vision of bounded rationality have been assumed to pose a liability and to be the likely culprit behind violations of rational norms. In this project, we question the seemingly obvious connection between cognitive limits and irrationality. Specifically, we investigate the extent to which limits in processing capacity and memory (e.g., forgetting), rather than hobbling cognitive performance, can help simple inferential heuristics perform well in natural environments. We explore the conditions under which decision-making strategies that take cognitive limits into account match or even exceed the accuracy of unboundedly rational strategies and consider whether cognitive illusions are a small price to pay for useful adaptations.
