Gigerenzer Gerd, Brighton Henry
Max Planck Institute for Human Development.
Top Cogn Sci. 2009 Jan;1(1):107-43. doi: 10.1111/j.1756-8765.2008.01006.x.
Heuristics are efficient cognitive processes that ignore information. In contrast to the widely held view that less processing reduces accuracy, the study of heuristics shows that less information, computation, and time can in fact improve accuracy. We review the major progress made so far: (a) the discovery of less-is-more effects; (b) the study of the ecological rationality of heuristics, which examines in which environments a given strategy succeeds or fails, and why; (c) an advancement from vague labels to computational models of heuristics; (d) the development of a systematic theory of heuristics that identifies their building blocks and the evolved capacities they exploit, and views the cognitive system as relying on an "adaptive toolbox;" and (e) the development of an empirical methodology that accounts for individual differences, conducts competitive tests, and has provided evidence for people's adaptive use of heuristics. Homo heuristicus has a biased mind and ignores part of the available information, yet a biased mind can handle uncertainty more efficiently and robustly than an unbiased mind relying on more resource-intensive and general-purpose processing strategies.
启发式方法是忽略信息的高效认知过程。与普遍认为的较少处理会降低准确性的观点相反，对启发式方法的研究表明，较少的信息、计算和时间实际上可以提高准确性。我们回顾了迄今为止取得的主要进展：（a）少即多效应的发现；（b）对启发式方法生态合理性的研究，该研究考察了给定策略在哪些环境中成功或失败以及原因；（c）从模糊标签到启发式方法计算模型的进步；（d）启发式方法系统理论的发展，该理论确定了它们的组成部分以及它们所利用的进化能力，并将认知系统视为依赖于一个“适应性工具箱”；（e）一种实证方法的发展，该方法考虑了个体差异，进行了竞争性测试，并为人们对启发式方法的适应性使用提供了证据。启发式人类有一个有偏差的思维，会忽略部分可用信息，但一个有偏差的思维比一个依赖更多资源密集型和通用处理策略的无偏差思维能更有效、更稳健地处理不确定性。
