SIMPLE HEURISTICS: BBS Call for Multiple Book Review
Stevan Harnad
harnad at coglit.ecs.soton.ac.uk
Fri Aug 27 16:08:16 EDT 1999
Below is the abstract of the Precis of a book that will shortly be
circulated for Multiple Book Review in Behavioral and Brain
Sciences (BBS):
SIMPLE HEURISTICS THAT MAKE US SMART: BBS MULTIPLE BOOK REVIEW
Gerd Gigerenzer, Peter M. Todd, and the ABC Research Group,
This book has been accepted for a muliple book review to be published in
Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary
journal providing Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial
current research in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences.
Reviewers must be BBS Associates or nominated by a BBS Associate. (All
prior BBS referees, editors, authors, and commentators are also equivalent
to Associates.) To be considered as a reviewer for this article, to
suggest other appropriate reviewers, or for information about how to
become a BBS Associate, please send EMAIL to, BEFORE September 20, 1999:
bbs at cogsci.soton.ac.uk
or write to [PLEASE NOTE SLIGHTLY CHANGED ADDRESS]:
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
ECS: New Zepler Building
University of Southampton
Highfield, Southampton
SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM
http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/bbs/
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/
If you are not a BBS Associate, please send your CV and the name of a BBS
Associate (there are currently over 10,000 worldwide) who is familiar with
your work. All past BBS authors, referees and commentators are eligible to
become BBS Associates.
To help us put together a balanced list of reviewers, please give some
indication of the aspects of the topic on which you would bring your
areas of expertise to bear if you were selected as a reviewer. An
electronic draft of the full text is available for inspection with a
WWW browser according to the instructions that follow after the
abstract. Please also specify (1) If you need the book (2) whether you
can make it by the deadline of December 10, 1999.
Please note that it is the book, not the Precis, that is to be reviewed.
It would be helpful if you indicated in your reply whether you already
have the book or would require a copy.
_____________________________________________________________
Precis of Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart
BBS MULTIPLE BOOK REVIEW
Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart, was published by
Oxford University Press 1999.
Peter M. Todd & Gerd Gigerenzer
Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition
Max Planck Institute for Human Development
Lentzeallee 94, 14195 Berlin, Germany
ptodd at mpib-berlin.mpg.de
gigerenzer at mpib-berlin.mpg.de
http://www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/abc
ABSTRACT: How can anyone be rational in a world where knowledge is
limited, time is pressing, and deep thought is often an
unattainable luxury? Traditional models of unbounded rationality
and optimization in cognitive science, economics, and animal
behavior have tended to view decision-makers as possessing
supernatural powers of reason, limitless knowledge, and endless
time. But understanding decisions in the real world requires a more
psychologically plausible notion of bounded rationality. In
"Simple heuristics that make us smart", we explore fast and frugal
heuristics--simple rules in the mind's adaptive toolbox for making
decisions with realistic mental resources. These heuristics can
enable both living organisms and artificial systems to make smart
choices quickly and with a minimum of information by exploiting the
way that information is structured in particular environments. In
this precis, we show how simple building blocks that control
information search, stop search, and make decisions can be put
together to form classes of heuristics, including: ignorance-based
and one-reason decision making for choice, elimination models for
categorization, and satisficing heuristics for sequential search.
These simple heuristics perform comparably to more complex
algorithms, particularly when generalizing to new data--that is,
simplicity leads to robustness. We present evidence regarding when
people use simple heuristics and describe the challenges to be
addressed by this research program.
KEYWORDS: Bounded rationality, heuristics, decision making,
simplicity, robustness, limited information search, satisficing,
ignorance-based reasoning, elimination models, environment
structure, adaptive toolbox
____________________________________________________________
To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate commentator for
this article, an electronic draft is retrievable from the World Wide Web
or by anonymous ftp from the US or UK BBS Archive. Ftp instructions
follow below. Please do not prepare a commentary on this draft. Just let
us know, after having inspected it, what relevant expertise you feel you
would bring to bear on what aspect of the article.
The URLs you can use to get to the BBS Archive:
http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/bbs/
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/Archive/bbs.todd.html
*** FIVE IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENTS ***
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(1) There have been some very important developments in the
area of Web archiving of scientific papers very recently.
Please see:
Science:
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/science.html
Nature:
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/nature.html
American Scientist:
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/amlet.html
Chronicle of Higher Education:
http://www.chronicle.com/free/v45/i04/04a02901.htm
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(2) All authors in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences are
strongly encouraged to archive all their papers (on their
Home-Servers as well as) on CogPrints:
http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/
It is extremely simple to do so and will make all of our papers
available to all of us everywhere at no cost to anyone.
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(3) BBS has a new policy of accepting submissions electronically.
Authors can specify whether they would like their submissions
archived publicly during refereeing in the BBS under-refereeing
Archive, or in a referees-only, non-public archive.
Upon acceptance, preprints of final drafts are moved to the
public BBS Archive:
ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/BBS/.WWW/index.html
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/Archive/
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(4) BBS has expanded its annual page quota and is now appearing
bimonthly, so the service of Open Peer Commentary can now be be
offered to more target articles. The BBS refereeing procedure is
also going to be considerably faster with the new electronic
submission and processing procedures. Authors are invited to submit
papers to:
Email: bbs at cogsci.soton.ac.uk
Web: http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk
http://bbs.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/
INSTRUCTIONS FOR AUTHORS:
http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/bbs/instructions.for.authors.html
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/instructions.for.authors.html
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(5) Call for Book Nominations for BBS Multiple Book Review
In the past, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) journal had only
been able to do 1-2 BBS multiple book treatments per year, because
of our limited annual page quota. BBS's new expanded page quota
will make it possible for us to increase the number of books we
treat per year, so this is an excellent time for BBS Associates and
biobehavioral/cognitive scientists in general to nominate books you
would like to see accorded BBS multiple book review.
(Authors may self-nominate, but books can only be selected on the
basis of multiple nominations.) It would be very helpful if you
indicated in what way a BBS Multiple Book Review of the book(s) you
nominate would be useful to the field (and of course a rich list of
potential reviewers would be the best evidence of its potential
impact!).
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