Gerd Gigerenzer

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Gerd Gigerenzer (b. September 3, 1947) is a German psychologist who has studied the use of bounded rationality and heuristics in decision making, especially in medicine. A critic of the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, he argues that heuristics should not lead us to conceive of human thinking as riddled with irrational cognitive biases, but rather to conceive rationality as an adaptive tool that is not identical to the rules of formal logic or the probability calculus.^[1]

With Daniel Goldstein he first theorized the recognition heuristic.

He has written several books intended for a lay audience on the subject of heuristics and decision-making, including Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart (1999), Bounded Rationality: The Adaptive Toolbox (2001), Reckoning with Risk: Learning to Live with Uncertainty (2002, published in the U.S. as Calculated Risks), and Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious (2007)

Currently, he is a director at Max Planck Institute for Human Development. He is married to Lorraine Daston.