ARE HUMANS POOR AT REASONING?
This brief overview of the literature on thinking might lead us to wonder whether we are capable of being rational and logical, or whether we fall short of that ‘ideal’. Caution is needed with this question. Survival depends on being good at doing things that confront us in the real world. Rather than think of rationality as an absolute, Herbert Simon (1991) introduced the idea of satisficing – that is, performing optimally with the limited data and time available to us. This is known as bounded rationality – it is about as close to the idea of being rational as we are likely
to get, and is the best we
could expect from any system
with finite resources.
It has also been argued
that many of the tasks used
in laboratories are artificial,
and that they lack ecological
validity. In other words, they are not typical of the kinds of problem
humans have to solve. (For a discussion of this important
idea, see Cosmides & Tooby, 1997; Gigerenzer & Hoffrage,
1995.) Gigerenzer and Hoffrage show, for example, that when
information is presented in terms of frequencies ( like 95 out of
100) rather than probabilities ( like 0.95), people do better at a range of reasoning tasks, and ignore base-rates to a lesser degree. They argue that this is because we are naturally adapted to frequency information because we tend to collect instances one at a time. These authors are working on a program of investigation into evolutionary cognition, which attempts to establish whether we are good at certain ways of thinking because we have evolved that way to adapt to our evolutionary environment (see also Piatelli- Palmarini, 1992).
[Herbert Simon (1916–2001) was a true cognitive scientist, crossing disciplinary boundaries in his efforts to understand human problem solving and decision making. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for his work on administrative behaviour, but is best known in psychology for his work on the representation of problems, and problem-solving heuristics (with the eminent cognitive scientist Alan Newell). In the early 1950s, Simon and Newell conceived the idea that the best way to study problemsolving was to simulate it with computer programs. Computer simulation of human cognition subsequently became Simon’s central research interest, which he pursued until his death in 2001.]
This brief overview of the literature on thinking might lead us to wonder whether we are capable of being rational and logical, or whether we fall short of that ‘ideal’. Caution is needed with this question. Survival depends on being good at doing things that confront us in the real world. Rather than think of rationality as an absolute, Herbert Simon (1991) introduced the idea of satisficing – that is, performing optimally with the limited data and time available to us. This is known as bounded rationality – it is about as close to the idea of being rational as we are likely
to get, and is the best we
could expect from any system
with finite resources.
It has also been argued
that many of the tasks used
in laboratories are artificial,
and that they lack ecological
validity. In other words, they are not typical of the kinds of problem
humans have to solve. (For a discussion of this important
idea, see Cosmides & Tooby, 1997; Gigerenzer & Hoffrage,
1995.) Gigerenzer and Hoffrage show, for example, that when
information is presented in terms of frequencies ( like 95 out of
100) rather than probabilities ( like 0.95), people do better at a range of reasoning tasks, and ignore base-rates to a lesser degree. They argue that this is because we are naturally adapted to frequency information because we tend to collect instances one at a time. These authors are working on a program of investigation into evolutionary cognition, which attempts to establish whether we are good at certain ways of thinking because we have evolved that way to adapt to our evolutionary environment (see also Piatelli- Palmarini, 1992).
[Herbert Simon (1916–2001) was a true cognitive scientist, crossing disciplinary boundaries in his efforts to understand human problem solving and decision making. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for his work on administrative behaviour, but is best known in psychology for his work on the representation of problems, and problem-solving heuristics (with the eminent cognitive scientist Alan Newell). In the early 1950s, Simon and Newell conceived the idea that the best way to study problemsolving was to simulate it with computer programs. Computer simulation of human cognition subsequently became Simon’s central research interest, which he pursued until his death in 2001.]
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