In Adaptive Thinking, Gerd Gigerenzer follows up on his earlier book, The Empire of Chance. Part of his new book, Adaptive Thinking, is a continuation of his earlier discussion. Gigerenzer reacts against the dominance of significance testing, and looks closely at how it has shaped psychological theories. In particular, Gigerenzer places the "cognitive illusions" of Tversky, Khanneman, and many other behavioral scientists under very close scrutiny.

Gigerenzer's main thrust is that humans did not evolve in the psychology laboratory, with good command of probability theory to help them work on word problems. Instead, he argues, humans evolved in environments with lots of noise, and had to use regular features of the world to develop simple and effective rules of action. In this, he echoes and extends the work by economist Herbert Simon in the 1950s.

Take one of his examples: You live in Detroit. 1 in 100 new cars of brand X break down. 10 in 100 cars of brand Y break down. Your friend has car X, and it just broke down yesterday. Which should you buy? Well, clearly if you're "rational" you buy brand X. But consider:

You live in a jungle. 1 in 100 children is eaten by a crocodile while swimming in the river. 10 in 100 falls to their death while playing in the tree. Just yesterday, little Bobby was swimming and got eaten by a crocodile. Where should you let your kid play?

According to Tversky, Khanneman, and other modern cognitive scientists, you would be "irrational" to fear the river, since the long term probability of dying there is still only 2 out of 100.

If we evolved in the jungle situation, is it any wonder that most people rely on the advice of their friend in the car situation? Does this make them "irrational?"

Gigerenzer looks at the history of decision research, and offers a concrete and predictive program for the study of human rationality. The book is fairly short, very interesting, and casts serious doubt on many aspects of contemporary cognitive research. I recommend it to anyone with an interest in psychology or decision making, even non professionals.

Gigerenzer is fantastic.

Dr Gigerenzer is one of my very favorite people in this field (um, whatever that is). i absolutely adore the book Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart. That book was a collection of chapters by various authors from his ABC group that put together all the research their group had done into a cohesive whole. This book is a collection of older essays written by Gerd himself, some of them about the same topics covered in Simple Heuristics only in fewer pages and thus in much less detail. Note that all of these essays (i think) have been published before. They're here because you probably don't own all the academic journals these articles came from.

There are other essays too. Several are about how psychologists (not average people) misunderstand statistics, especially probabilities and Bayes. Gerd has always seemed pro-human and here he once again writes about how work by Tversky, Kahneman and others claiming humans are lousy at statistics (and thus decision making) is flawed. In a nutshell, humans are good at making decisions but Tversky and friends (like most psychologists, including me) are poor at designing psychology experiments.

Another article is about a friend and mentor who did good work but didn't get as much respect as he deserved.

So the book is about a lot of things. As before, Gerd is a good writer and can be understood by most people, and he avoids lots of pseudo-math and field-specific jargon, but the book is still fairly dry and isn't super exciting. i don't know if people not in the field would really want to read this. And since this is a collection of unrelated essays, it's probably not a good first introduction to Dr Gigerenzer. But if, like me, you enjoy collecting all of his stuff, this is a good book to have

$31.72 for a 17-year-old book in digital format? Is this the book version of EpiPen price gouging? The paperback edition is half that price. I was going to buy the Kindle version but I think I'll go to the library. My rating is only for the price. I have not read the book.

The approach of Dr. Gerd is very convincing. As an earlier reviewer mentioned, it is "pro-human" and treats people as intelligent decision makers. Gerd clearly shows how Kahneman and Tversky's experiments were flawed. In one interesting chapter, almost all of these experiments were repeated but with appropriate settings. The results were the opposite of those of Kahneman and Tversky: People are smart! I congratulate Dr. Gerd for this achievement, but prefer that he writes a book from the beginning, instead of collecting his earlier papers.

From what I've read of the book so far, it is well written and informative. I am giving this book one star primarily because of the authors' decision to price the Kindle version of this book at $27.04. Shame on you. The whole idea of Kindle is that the author's costs are practically eliminated, and that this savings is shared with the purchaser. $27.04 is just plain greedy. This is one customer you will not be profiting from. I will finish reading the book at the library or book store.

The book is great and the service was everything that I expected.

A good read into adaptive behaviour as the central tenet of intelligence.