The Roots of Racial Tensions: urban ethnic neighbourhoods

Rationality the Fast and Frugal Way

Date: Monday, 8 July 2002
Time: 6.00pm
Venue: Old Theatre, Old Building, LSE
Houghton Street, WC2A 2AE

Speaker: Professor Gerd Gigerenzer
Chair: Professor Nicholas Humphrey
Discussant: Dr Daniel Read

In Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart (OUP, 1999), Professor Gigerenzer's research group put forward a program for understanding human decision making in terms of fast and frugal heuristics. In this lecture, he will present the key ideas and review what has been learned since. Unlike most models of rational reasoning which tend to view the mind as a supernatural being with unlimited time and knowledge, the study of the "adaptive toolbox" analyzes the environmental structures particular heuristics can exploit in order to make fast, frugal, and smart decisions. The rationality of the adaptive toolbox is not logical, but ecological. Theories of human rationality need less Aristotle and more Darwin.

Gerd Gigerener is director of the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. His latest book, Reckoning with Risk: Learning to Live with Uncertainty, is published by Penguin Books on 4 July.

This lecture is free and open to all. For more information, contact the Centre for the Philosophy of Natural and Social Science on 020 7955 6842 or email philcent@lse.ac.uk.