Fast and frugal heuristics and naturalistic decision making: a review of their commonalities and differences

Both the fast and frugal heuristics (FFHs) and the naturalistic decision making (NDM) research programmes have identified important areas of inquiry previously neglected in the traditional study of human judgment and decision making, and have greatly contributed to the understanding of people's real-world decision making under environmental constraints. The two programmes share similar theoretical arguments regarding the rationality, optimality, and role of experience in decision making. Their commonalities have made them appealing to each other, and efforts have been made, by their leading academics, to promote synergy and integration. However, there has been little progress towards this during the last decade. This paper seeks to address this gap by seeking to better understand their commonalities and differences. To do so, literature relating to the two programmes is reviewed. The findings of the review indicated that an integration of the two could enhance FFHs' field research in applied settings, facilitate its investigation on boundary conditions of people's decision strategy selection, enable NDM to embrace emerging research opportunities in the age of big data, as well as permit each programme to enlighten the research topics and to validate the research findings of the other.     

Classifying simulated air threats with fast and frugal heuristics

In three experiments, subjects learned to classify simulated aircraft using four probabilistic cues then classified test sets designed to contrast predictions of several compensatory and non-compensatory heuristics. Results indicated that a proportion of subjects appeared to use a non-compensatory fast and frugal heuristic but that significant proportions used less frugal compensatory decision rules. The relative proportions of subjects exhibiting responses consistent with the fast and frugal heuristic versus other decision rules was largely unaffected by manipulations of time pressure and perceived cue uncertainty. An extreme time constraint, however, did result in significant differences in the proportions of subjects who preferred non-compensatory to compensatory decision rules. These results suggest that it is possible to model multi-attribute decision tasks like threat assessment with a fast and frugal heuristic although no single heuristic is a general model for the simulated threat assessment task. Copyright © 2006 Crown in the right of Canada. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Book Review: Ecological rationality and its heuristics

In this study both adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and typically developing controls were presented with conditional reasoning problems using familiar content. In this task both valid and fallacious conditional inferences that would otherwise be drawn can be suppressed if counterexample cases are brought to mind. Such suppression occurs when additional premises are presented, whose effect is to suggest such counterexample cases. In this study we predicted and observed that this suppression effect was substantially and significantly weaker for autistic participants. We take this as evidence that autistics are less contextualised in their reasoning, a finding that can be linked to research on autism on a variety of other cognitive tasks.     

Training fast and frugal heuristics in military decision making

Fast and frugal heuristics have been used to model decision making in applied domains very effectively, suggesting that they could be used to improve applied decision making. We developed a fast and frugal heuristic for infantry decisions using experts from the British Army. This was able to predict around 80% of their decisions using three cues. Next, we examined the benefits of learning to use the fast and frugal heuristic by training junior officers in the British Army to apply the heuristic and assessing their accuracy and mental workload when making decisions. Their performance was compared to a control condition of junior officers who applied standard military decision methods. Participants using the fast and frugal heuristic made decisions as accurately as participants in the control condition, but with reduced mental demand. This demonstrates that fast and frugal heuristics can be learnt and are as effective as analytic decision methods.     

Fast and frugal heuristics are plausible models of cognition: reply to Dougherty, Franco-Watkins, and Thomas (2008)

M. R. Dougherty, A. M. Franco-Watkins, and R. Thomas (2008) conjectured that fast and frugal heuristics need an automatic frequency counter for ordering cues. In fact, only a few heuristics order cues, and these orderings can arise from evolutionary, social, or individual learning, none of which requires automatic frequency counting. The idea that cue validities cannot be computed because memory does not encode missing information is misinformed; it implies that measures of co-occurrence are incomputable and would invalidate most theories of cue learning. They also questioned the recognition heuristic's psychological plausibility on the basis of their belief that it has not been implemented in a memory model, although it actually has been implemented in ACT-R (L. J. Schooler & R. Hertwig, 2005). On the positive side, M. R. Dougherty et al. discovered a new mechanism for a less-is-more effect. The authors of the present article specify minimal criteria for psychological plausibility, describe some genuine challenges in the study of heuristics, and conclude that fast and frugal heuristics are psychologically plausible: They use limited search and are tractable and robust.     

Idealisation,naturalism, and rationality: Some lessons from Minimal Rationality

In his bookMinimal Rationality (1986), Christopher Cherniak draws deep and widespread conclusions from our finitude, and not only for philosophy but also for a wide range of science as well. Cherniak's basic idea is that traditional philosophical theories of rationality represent idealisations that are inaccessible to finite rational agents. It is the purpose of this paper to apply a theory of idealisation in science to Cherniak's arguments. The heart of the theory is a distinction between idealisations that represent reversible, solely quantitative simplifications and those that represent irreversible, degenerate idealisations which collapse out essential theoretical structure. I argue that Cherniak's position is best understood as assigning the latter status to traditional rationality theories and that, so understood, his arguments may be illuminated, expanded, and certain common criticisms of them rebutted. The result, however, is a departure from traditional, formalist theories of rationality of a more radical kind than Cherniak contemplates, with widespread ramifications for philosophical theory, especially philosophy of science itself.I would like to thank Professor R. E. Butts and the Department of Philosophy at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, for generous support and stimulating discussion during the research leave at which time this paper was prepared, and the University of Newcastle and its vice-chancellor, Professor K. Morgan, for support. I am greatly indebted to extended discussion with Professor H. I. Brown, to thoughtful comments from two anonymousSynthese referees, and to discussion with Professor W. Harper; between them they have sharpened and corrected the presentation at several places, especially Sections 3 (referees), 4passim (Brown), 4.1 (referee), 4.3 (Harper). More specific acknowledgement is given as appropriate.     

Psychological plausibility of the theory of probabilistic mental models and the fast and frugal heuristics

The theory of probabilistic mental models (PMM; G. Gigerenzer, U. Hoffrage, & H. Kleinb?lting, 1991) has had a major influence on the field of judgment and decision making, with the most recent important modifications to PMM theory being the identification of several fast and frugal heuristics (G. Gigerenzer & D. G. Goldstein, 1996). These heuristics were purported to provide psychologically plausible cognitive process models that describe a variety of judgment behavior. In this article, the authors evaluate the psychological plausibility of the assumptions upon which PMM were built and, consequently, the psychological plausibility of several of the fast and frugal heuristics. The authors argue that many of PMM theory's assumptions are questionable, given available data, and that fast and frugal heuristics are, in fact, psychologically implausible.     

Compound cue processing within the fast and frugal heuristics approach in nonlinearly separable environments

Three experiments investigated whether participants used Take The Best (TTB) Configural, a fast and frugal heuristic that processes configurations of cues when making inferences concerning which of two alternatives has a higher criterion value. Participants were presented with a compound cue that was nonlinearly separable from its elements. The compound was highly valid in Experiments 1 and 2, but invalid in Experiment 3. Participants’ causal mental models were manipulated via instructions: participants were either told that cues acted through the same causal mechanism (configural causal model), through different causal mechanisms (elemental causal model), or the causal mechanisms were not specified (neutral causal model). A high percentage of participants used TTB-Configural when they had a configural causal model and a highly valid compound existed, suggesting that causal knowledge can be incorporated in otherwise very basic cognitive mechanisms to allow fine-grained adaptation to complex task structures.     

Fast and frugal versus regression models of human judgement

Following Brunswik (1952), social judgement theorists have long relied on regression models to describe both an individual's judgements and the environment about which such judgements are made. However, social judgement theory is not synonymous with these compensatory, static, structural models. We compared the characterisations of physicians' judgements using a regression model with that of a non-compensatory process model (called fast and frugal). We found that both models fit the data equally well. Both models suggest that physicians use few cues, that they disagree among themselves, and that their stated cue use is discrepant with the models' stated cue use. However, the fast and frugal model is easier to convey to physicians and is also more psychologically plausible. Implications for how social judgement theorists conceptualise the process of vicarious functioning are discussed.     

When one cue is not enough: Combining fast and frugal heuristics with compound cue processing

One-reason decision-making heuristics as proposed by Gigerenzer, Todd, and the ABC Research Group (1999) Gigerenzer, G. and Todd, P. M. 1999. “Fast and frugal heuristics: The adaptive toolbox”. In Simple heuristics that make us smart, Edited by: Gigerenzer, G., Todd, P. M. and the ABC Research Group. 3–34. New York: Oxford University Press.  [Google Scholar] have been shown to perform accurately. However, such strategies cannot deal with compound cues. We propose the Take The Best Configural Cue (TTB-Configural) as a fast and frugal heuristic that processes compound cues. In a series of three experiments, we analysed whether participants used this heuristic when making cue-based inferences on which of two alternatives had a higher criterion value. In two of the experiments, two cues were amalgamated into a valid compound cue by applying the AND or the OR logical rule, respectively. In the third experiment, there was no valid compound cue. Within each experiment, we also manipulated causal mental models through instructions. In the configural causal model, cues were said to act through the same causal mechanism. In the elemental causal model, cues were said to act through different causal mechanisms. In the neutral causal model, the causal mechanism was not specified. When a highly valid compound existed, and participants had a configural causal model, for the majority of them the strategy that could best account for their choices was TTB-Configural. Otherwise, the strategy that best predicted their choices was the Take The Best (TTB) heuristic.     

When one cue is not enough: combining fast and frugal heuristics with compound cue processing

One-reason decision-making heuristics as proposed by Gigerenzer, Todd, and the ABC Research Group (1999) have been shown to perform accurately. However, such strategies cannot deal with compound cues. We propose the Take The Best Configural Cue (TTB-Configural) as a fast and frugal heuristic that processes compound cues. In a series of three experiments, we analysed whether participants used this heuristic when making cue-based inferences on which of two alternatives had a higher criterion value. In two of the experiments, two cues were amalgamated into a valid compound cue by applying the AND or the OR logical rule, respectively. In the third experiment, there was no valid compound cue. Within each experiment, we also manipulated causal mental models through instructions. In the configural causal model, cues were said to act through the same causal mechanism. In the elemental causal model, cues were said to act through different causal mechanisms. In the neutral causal model, the causal mechanism was not specified. When a highly valid compound existed, and participants had a configural causal model, for the majority of them the strategy that could best account for their choices was TTB-Configural. Otherwise, the strategy that best predicted their choices was the Take The Best (TTB) heuristic.     

Career decision making: The limits of rationality and the abundance of non-conscious processes

The terms of work have changed, with multiple transitions now characterizing the arc of a typical career. This article examines an ongoing shift in the area of vocational decision making, as it moves from a place where “it’s all about the match” to one closer to “it’s all about adapting to change”. We review literatures on judgment and decision making, 2-system models of decisional thought, the neuroanatomy of decision making, and the role of non-conscious processes in decision making. Acknowledging the limits of rationality, and the abundance of non-conscious processes in decision making, obliges us to act in ways that mitigate the inherent difficulties to which those processes make us vulnerable. We conclude that both rational and intuitive processes seem dialectically intertwined in effective decision making, and we offer a trilateral model of career decision making that includes rational and intuitive mechanisms, both of which are funded and kept in check by occupational engagement.     

Career decision making: The limits of rationality and the abundance of non-conscious processes

The terms of work have changed, with multiple transitions now characterizing the arc of a typical career. This article examines an ongoing shift in the area of vocational decision making, as it moves from a place where “it’s all about the match” to one closer to “it’s all about adapting to change”. We review literatures on judgment and decision making, 2-system models of decisional thought, the neuroanatomy of decision making, and the role of non-conscious processes in decision making. Acknowledging the limits of rationality, and the abundance of non-conscious processes in decision making, obliges us to act in ways that mitigate the inherent difficulties to which those processes make us vulnerable. We conclude that both rational and intuitive processes seem dialectically intertwined in effective decision making, and we offer a trilateral model of career decision making that includes rational and intuitive mechanisms, both of which are funded and kept in check by occupational engagement.     

Geographic profiling: the fast,frugal, and accurate way

The current article addresses the ongoing debate about whether individuals can perform as well as actuarial techniques when confronted with real world, consequential decisions. A single experiment tested the ability of participants (N = 215) and an actuarial technique to accurately predict the residential locations of serial offenders based on information about where their crimes were committed. Results indicated that participants introduced to a ‘Circle’ or ‘Decay’ heuristic showed a significant improvement in the accuracy of predictions, and that their post‐training performance did not differ significantly from the predictions of one leading actuarial technique. Further analysis of individual performances indicated that approximately 50% of participants used appropriate heuristics that typically led to accurate predictions even before they received training, while nearly 75% improved their predictive accuracy once introduced to either of the two heuristics. Several possible explanations for participants' accurate performances are discussed and the practical implications for police investigations are highlighted. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Bailing and jailing the fast and frugal way

Legal decisions such as the decision to bail upon adjourning a case have major consequences for both defendants and society. In the English system, magistrates, most of whom are lay people, are afforded considerable discretion and must work under constraints such as time pressure. Judgment analysis of the bail decision making policies of 81 magistrates from 44 courts throughout England and Wales revealed intra‐ and inter‐magistrate inconsistency in bail decisions, discrepancies between stated and elicited cue use, and high levels of post‐decisional confidence. Furthermore, magistrates' policies were better described and predicted by a fast and frugal model characterized by noncompensatory cue use, than by either of two compensatory integration models. The fast and frugal model portrays a picture of bail decision making that conflicts with the ideal practice as defined by the due process model of justice. We discuss the implications of these findings for judgment and decision making research and criminal justice policy. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.