Recognising the recognition heuristic for what it is (and what it’s not)

Abstract

The diversity, ingenuity and differences of opinion displayed in the articles of the recent special issues on the recognition heuristic are testament to the power and theoretical fertility of a simple idea about the role of recognition in decision making. In this brief comment I mention a number of these papers, but my focus is on points of agreement and disagreement with the conclusions drawn by Gigerenzer and Goldstein (2011) in their review of a decade’s worth of research on the recognition heuristic.

Keywords

• judgement
• ecological rationality
• recognition
• heuristic