Gerd Gigerenzer has made some important contributions to the study of decision-making. As someone who has been educated in the US system (at least for my PhD) I find it interesting that he largely rejects that approach. He, often correctly, makes the point that a lot of tests of decision-making set those being tested up for failure. Then we say they are rubbish decision-makers. It doesn’t tell you much about the participants, but it does tell you a lot about people setting the tests. Gigerenzer often comes across as a bit of a cantankerous bloke who has a good point underneath. That said, like the people he criticizes he risks beating his point to death. Yes, it is important, as he emphasizes, to recognize that intuition can be good. That is a valuable counterpoint to the ‘everyone is irrational’ folks. That said, intuition can be good or bad. Defending intuition is important but it is also important to remember intuition isn’t magical.
The Bias Bias
Gigerenzer talks of the bias bias. Basically, to get something published in modern academia you need to show that people are doing something odd. I get his point, a lot of psych studies over the years (maybe it is a little better now?) seem to feature the bias of the week. There has been less thought to how they fit together, or what they mean. A lot of papers seem to start with the question: How can we show that undergraduates make silly decisions when we ask them weird questions?
Gigerenzer is big on relevance. People think that when they are asked about something the questions will give relevant information. This means that when experimenters give them irrelevant information they may be tricked, as they try to make sense of the information. It tells you more about how clever the professors studying decision-making are in designing tests rather than how people make meaningful decisions in their lives outside the lab.
What Do Tests Actually Test?
It is always worth being a bit skeptical of tests that purport to show that people are stupid. Often respondents don’t care about what you are asking them, in which case you may not get their A game responses. Sometimes the game is rigged against them. Intelligence or aptitude tests may measure your socio-economic background or gender, especially when they ask knowledge questions that some groups are much more likely to have encountered than others.
Indeed, a lot of Gigerenzer’s defense of intuition is the idea that it was originally attacked as “female”. He says that particular gender-based bias isn’t necessarily the case nowadays, at least in academic studies, but he is right to worry that a lot of the attitudes we might bring can be leftovers from the past.
The Politics Of Nudges
Gigerenzer criticizes David Cameron (former Conservative Uk Prime Minister) for his interest in nudging. (Encouraging better decision making by the public). I am going to defend David Cameron. (A phrase I never thought I’d write given his stupidity and general uselessness helped give us Brexit). By investing in nudging, at least, Cameron had a point.
Gigerenzer uses the classic argument that governments should act not nudge, e.g., if something is bad why not ban it rather than nudge against it. But the best action to take depends on the situation. Sometimes the problem caused is so big you should ban the offending thing. Still, sometimes you could gain public benefit through nudges and banning is politically impossible or would harm a lot of people who’d be caught up in the ban. Nudges are a tool, they shouldn’t always be used but why wouldn’t you use them sometimes when the circumstances were right?
In many ways he employs two contradictory arguments against nudges. 1) Nudges are ineffective and used by governments to evade having to do something, and 2) Nudges are an infringement on liberty through mind control.
…governments have a scientific blueprint to nudge their citizens into “proper” behavior”
Gigerenzer, 2023, page 12
I can’t see how both of these criticisms can be correct. If nudges are ineffective then they can’t be mind control and if they are mind control they can’t be ineffective.
Gigerenzer somewhat suggests the idea that libertarian paternalism (Thaler and Sunstein’s umbrella term for nudging) is more extreme than hard paternalism (ordering people) because it is less overt. This seems completely over-the-top to me. I buy that sometimes nudging is a weak policy prescriptive and that politicians might hide behind it to avoid controversial action. That said, its low-cost approach is surely worth trying when a perfect solution isn’t available
Running A Research Group
In his mass-market book that I’m discussing today, The Intelligence of Intuition, Gigerenzer takes lots of pages at the end (in a short book) to tell us how to run a decision-making research center. It was a bit odd. I agree with a lot of what he says. I am a big believer in the “cakes rule”. This is that people who have a success should bring in cakes to celebrate. As a vegan I can’t usually eat the cakes but that isn’t the point. It is about creating a culture that celebrates success and encourages “boasting” but not in a crass way. The lesson is that bringing in cakes to work is good.
Still, I was wondering why he thought most readers would be running their own research centers. I’d love to run my own center, but I doubt that I ever will and I’m a tenured professor. The extensive notes on this topic seemed a bit random. If you ever plan to run a research center, I have a book for you, but I doubt most readers will ever do that. To make the book more relevant, and Gigerenzer likes relevance, I would have added a few more pages on the book’s topic — the value of intuition.
Intuition Is Good Not Magical
Gigerenzer argues that people disparage intuition. They won’t say intuition is good even when they use it. Managers bring in consultants to justify with fancy tables the intuitive decisions that they have already made. Gigerenzer suggests more than 50% of consulting projects are just to give support to decisions that have already been taken, (page 8).
Generally speaking, I buy his argument. Unfortunately, I think Gigerenzer overdoes it. Gigerenzer’s main point is that people can take good decisions using their intuition when they are experts, i.e., have trained their intuition. That makes sense. To be clear this effective intuition applies in a lot of everyday situations in life. We are experts in whether to trust people from our personal experience. We might be surprisingly good at that as we have trained all our lives in assessing people.
But we aren’t experts at everything. A major part of the nudging literature is trying to encourage people to pay into their pensions etc… There is absolutely no good reason that I can see to believe that the public has expertise in picking the right pension. We might do it a handful of times in life and many try and avoid thinking about the topic entirely. As such, there seems little reason to think that our intuitions will be any good as they are largely untrained. People often can do with some help — a nudge if you would like to call it that.
Intuition Can Be Good Or Bad
Intuition can be good, or it can be bad. Let’s make sure we don’t disparage intuition when it is the best tool that we have. Still, let’s not get into the opposite problem and assume everyone knows what they are doing automatically when they are making important life-altering decisions, they have no experience of the issue, and haven’t thought about it before.
For more by Gerd Gigerenzer see Risk, Uncertainty and Monty Hall and Are We Good Decision Makers?
For more on nudging see Nudging: Calm Down It Really Is Not The End Of Freedom, A Taxonomy Of Nudging, Sludges And Nudges, Nudges Are Not Magical (Just in Case Someone Thought They Were) and Who Doesn’t Want Nudges And Competent Government?
For more on rationality and irrationality, Selfishness and Rationality, Rationality And Marketing Strategy | Marketing Thought and Should We Get Rid Of Irrationality? Perhaps, What Is Irrationality?
Read: Gerd Gigerenzer (2023) The Intelligence of Intuition, Cambridge University Press
