18 Facts About Gerd Gigerenzer

Gerd Gigerenzer was born on 3 September 1947 and is a German psychologist who has studied the use of bounded rationality and heuristics in decision making.

Gerd Gigerenzer investigates how humans make inferences about their world with limited time and knowledge.

Gerd Gigerenzer proposes that, in an uncertain world, probability theory is not sufficient; people use smart heuristics, that is, rules of thumb.

Gerd Gigerenzer argues that heuristics are not irrational or always second-best to optimization, as the accuracy-effort trade-off view assumes, in which heuristics are seen as short-cuts that trade less effort for less accuracy.

Gerd Gigerenzer was born on 3 September 1947 in Wallersdorf, Germany.

Gerd Gigerenzer received a Master of Arts and a Doctor of Philosophy in psychology from the University of Munich in 1974 and 1977, respectively.

Gerd Gigerenzer received the postdoctoral degree of habilitation at the university's department of psychology in 1982.

Previously working at the University of Munich, Gerd Gigerenzer moved to the University of Konstanz in 1984 and to the University of Salzburg in 1990.

Gerd Gigerenzer argues that heuristic reasoning should not lead us to conceive of human thinking as riddled with irrational cognitive biases, but rather to conceive rationality as an adaptive tool that is not identical to the rules of formal logic or of probability calculus.

Alongside his research on heuristics, Gerd Gigerenzer investigates risk communication in situations where risks can actually be calculated or precisely estimated.

Gerd Gigerenzer has developed an ecological approach to risk communication where the key is the match between cognition and the presentation of the information in the environment.

Gerd Gigerenzer has taught risk literacy to some 1,000 doctors in their CMU and some 50 US federal judges, and natural frequencies has now entered the vocabulary of evidence-based medicine.

Intellectually, Gerd Gigerenzer's work is rooted in Herbert Simon's work on satisficing and on ecological and evolutionary views of cognition, where adaptive function and success is central, as opposed to logical structure and consistency, although the latter can be means towards function.

Gerd Gigerenzer calls for a second revolution, "replacing the image of an omniscient mind computing intricate probabilities and utilities with that of a bounded mind reaching into an adaptive toolbox filled with fast and frugal heuristics".

Gerd Gigerenzer was part of The Munich Beefeaters Dixieland Band which performed in a TV ad for the VW Golf around the time it came out in 1974.

Gerd Gigerenzer is married to Lorraine Daston, director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and has one daughter, Thalia Gigerenzer.

Gerd Gigerenzer was awarded honorary doctorates from the University of Basel, the Open University of the Netherlands, and the University of Southampton.

Gerd Gigerenzer is Batten Fellow at the Darden Business School, University of Virginia, Fellow of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, International Fellow of the British Academy, and International Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.