Gerd Gigerenzer

Gerd Gigerenzer is a German psychologist, behavioral scientist, statistician, writer, and educator who shaped our understanding of heuristics. Gigerenzer mainly studied the use of bounded rationality and heuristics in decision-making.

Together with Daniel Goldstein, he was the first to theorize the recognition heuristic and the take-the-best heuristic. He did so by providing evidence that a lack of familiarity with a topic can actually result in an individual making more accurate inferences.¹

Gigerenzer has been a strong critic of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s work, arguing that heuristics should not lead us to believe that human thinking is biased. Instead, Gigerenzer believes that we should think of rationality as an adaptive tool that is not consistent with the rules of logic.²

Today, Gigerenzer is the director of the Harding Center for Risk Literacy at the University of Potsdam. He has been able to apply his ideas outside of academia as the founder of Simply Rational, an institution that investigates decision-making. Gigerenzer also holds a director emeritus position at the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.