Ralph Hertwig

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Ralph Hertwig
Portrait Ralph Hertwig.jpg
Born (1963-11-04) 4 November 1963 (age 60)
Heilbronn, Germany
NationalityGerman
Alma mater University of Konstanz
Awards Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize (2017)
Scientific career
Fields Psychology
Decision making
Institutions Max Planck Institute for Human Development (Director since 2012)
Thesis Why Dr Gould's Homunculus doesn't think like Dr Gould: The "conjunction fallacy" reconsidered (1995)
Website www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/en/staff/ralph-hertwig

Ralph Hertwig (born 4 November 1963, in Heilbronn, Germany) is a German psychologist whose work focuses on the psychology of human judgment and decision making. Hertwig is Director of the Center for Adaptive Rationality [1] at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany. He grew up with his brothers Steffen Hertwig and Michael Hertwig (parents Walter and Inge Hertwig) in Talheim, Heilbronn.

Contents

Academic career

Hertwig received his Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Konstanz, Germany, in 1995. In the same year, he joined Gerd Gigerenzer's research group at the Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research in Munich; in 1997, the group moved to the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. In 2000, Hertwig received a fellowship from the German Research Foundation, which supported his research at Columbia University for three years. Hertwig obtained his Habilitation qualification from the Free University of Berlin in 2003, and in the same year became Assistant Professor for Applied Cognitive Science at the University of Basel, Switzerland. In 2005, he was appointed Full Professor of Cognitive and Decision Sciences. In 2012, Hertwig was appointed Director of the Center for Adaptive Rationality at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.

Research

Bounded rationality

Hertwig has been a key contributor to the study of bounded rationality, or how people search for information and make decisions with limited resources. His work investigates how decision making can be modeled in terms of fast and frugal heuristics—simple cognitive strategies that use little information and rely on just a few processing steps. Hertwig has examined, for instance, heuristics for making inferences (e.g., fluency heuristic [2] ), choices (e.g., priority heuristic, [3] natural mean heuristic [4] ), parental allocation decisions (e.g., equity heuristic [5] ), and medical decisions (e.g., first impression heuristic [6] ).

The rationality of a heuristic depends on whether it matches the structure of the environment in which it is applied. The notion of ecological, rather than logical, rationality challenges a core premise of the heuristics-and-biases program, namely, that intelligent processes must conform with the formal principles of logic, probability theory, and rational choice theory, irrespective of the decision context. [7] Hertwig does not uncritically accept these domain-general standards; rather, he asks which other context-specific concerns may be at play when such principles are violated. In his Ph.D. dissertation, he showed that the conjunction fallacy, a seemingly logical error often illustrated by the Linda problem, [8] reflects people's capacity to infer the meaning of polysemous terms like probability. [9] [10]

Another reason why fast and frugal heuristics can yield good decisions is that they take advantage of evolved cognitive capacities of the human mind. Together with Lael Schooler, [11] Hertwig has shown that ecologically smart forgetting—the capacity to forget information that is unlikely to be needed—fosters the use of heuristics that rely on partial ignorance (e.g., recognition heuristic, fluency heuristic). [12]

Learning about risks via description or experience

People can learn about the potential consequences of their decisions and the associated probabilities in two ways: by reading summaries of probability information (e.g., drug-package inserts) or by personally experiencing the consequences of their decisions, one at a time (e.g., going out on dates). Using monetary lotteries to compare these two learning modes, Hertwig and colleagues observed a "description-experience gap," a phenomenon by which rare events are given too much weight in decisions from description and too little weight in decisions from experience. [13] This occurs partly because decisions from experience are based on small samples, where people are simply less likely to experience the rare event. The description–experience gap has been observed across thousands of choices and found to generalize beyond monetary gambles to domains including causal reasoning, intertemporal choice, consumer choice, investment decisions, medical decisions, and adolescent risk taking. [14] [15]

Deliberate ignorance

People often deliberately choose not to know. For example, up to 55% of those who get tested for HIV do not return to pick up their results. [16] The conscious choice not to seek or use information has been called deliberate ignorance. In a theoretical article, Hertwig and Christoph Engel [17] argued that deliberate ignorance is not necessarily an anomaly but can serve important functions. [18] One such function is to act as an emotion-regulation device: people may avoid potentially threatening health information because it compromises cherished beliefs, they anticipate mental discomfort, or they want to keep hope alive. Hertwig and Engel are also co-editors of an interdisciplinary book exploring manifestations of deliberate ignorance from the right not to know in genetic testing to collective amnesia in transformational societies; from blinding in orchestral auditions to "don't ask, don't tell" policies in the military and beyond; and from efforts to prevent algorithms feeding on discriminatory data to the strategic lack of funding for research into gun violence. [19]

Boosting

To date, most public policy interventions informed by behavioral science evidence involve "nudges"; that is, non-fiscal and non-regulatory interventions that steer (nudge) people in a specific direction while preserving freedom of choice. [20] Hertwig's work has focused on "boosts," an alternative class of non-fiscal and non-regulatory policy interventions grounded in behavioral science. Boosts aim to improve people's decisional, cognitive, and motivational competences, making it easier for them to exercise their own agency. Instead of simply providing information, boosts offer a simple and sustainable strategy for successfully dealing with a given task. For instance, a boost with proven effectiveness in improving the quality of relationships is to imagine oneself as a third-party spectator when involved in a quarrel, and to mentally engage with this perspective-shifting strategy through quick writing exercises. [21] In an article written in collaboration with Till Grüne-Yanoff, [22] Hertwig examined how boosts differ from nudges in terms of the psychological mechanisms through which they operate, as well as their normative implications for transparency and autonomy. [23] For instance, while nudges can skirt conscious deliberation and therefore risk being manipulative, boosts require the individual's active cooperation, and thus need to be explicit and transparent. Other important publications by Hertwig tackle questions such as when boosts are more appropriate than nudges, [24] how to boost nutritional health, [25] how statistical information can best be communicated to improve risk literacy, [26] and how collective intelligence can be harnessed to boost medical diagnostic decisions. [27]

Selected works

Journal articles

Books

Honors and awards

Media coverage

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cognitive bias</span> Systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment

A cognitive bias is a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment. Individuals create their own "subjective reality" from their perception of the input. An individual's construction of reality, not the objective input, may dictate their behavior in the world. Thus, cognitive biases may sometimes lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, and irrationality.

A heuristic, or heuristic technique, is any approach to problem solving or self-discovery that employs a practical method that is not guaranteed to be optimal, perfect, or rational, but is nevertheless sufficient for reaching an immediate, short-term goal or approximation. Where finding an optimal solution is impossible or impractical, heuristic methods can be used to speed up the process of finding a satisfactory solution. Heuristics can be mental shortcuts that ease the cognitive load of making a decision.

Bounded rationality is the idea that rationality is limited when individuals make decisions, and under these limitations, rational individuals will select a decision that is satisfactory rather than optimal.

The conjunction fallacy is an inference that a conjoint set of two or more specific conclusions is likelier than any single member of that same set, in violation of the laws of probability. It is a type of formal fallacy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Base rate fallacy</span> Error in thinking which involves under-valuing base rate information

The base rate fallacy, also called base rate neglect or base rate bias, is a type of fallacy in which people tend to ignore the base rate in favor of the individuating information . Base rate neglect is a specific form of the more general extension neglect.

The recognition heuristic, originally termed the recognition principle, has been used as a model in the psychology of judgment and decision making and as a heuristic in artificial intelligence. The goal is to make inferences about a criterion that is not directly accessible to the decision maker, based on recognition retrieved from memory. This is possible if recognition of alternatives has relevance to the criterion. For two alternatives, the heuristic is defined as:

If one of two objects is recognized and the other is not, then infer that the recognized object has the higher value with respect to the criterion.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gerd Gigerenzer</span> German cognitive psychologist

Gerd Gigerenzer is a German psychologist who has studied the use of bounded rationality and heuristics in decision making. Gigerenzer is director emeritus of the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition (ABC) at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and director of the Harding Center for Risk Literacy, both in Berlin.

Daniel G. Goldstein is an American cognitive psychologist known for the specification and testing of heuristics and models of bounded rationality in the field of judgment and decision making. He is an honorary research fellow at London Business School and works with Microsoft Research as a principal researcher.

The gaze heuristic is a heuristic used in directing correct motion to achieve a goal using one main variable. An example of the gaze heuristic is catching a ball. The gaze heuristic is one example of psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer's one good reason heuristic, where human animals and non-human animals are able to process large amounts of information quickly and react, regardless of whether the information is consciously processed.

In psychology, a fluency heuristic is a mental heuristic in which, if one object is processed more fluently, faster, or more smoothly than another, the mind infers that this object has the higher value with respect to the question being considered. In other words, the more skillfully or elegantly an idea is communicated, the more likely it is to be considered seriously, whether or not it is logical.

Heuristics is the process by which humans use mental shortcuts to arrive at decisions. Heuristics are simple strategies that humans, animals, organizations, and even machines use to quickly form judgments, make decisions, and find solutions to complex problems. Often this involves focusing on the most relevant aspects of a problem or situation to formulate a solution. While heuristic processes are used to find the answers and solutions that are most likely to work or be correct, they are not always right or the most accurate. Judgments and decisions based on heuristics are simply good enough to satisfy a pressing need in situations of uncertainty, where information is incomplete. In that sense they can differ from answers given by logic and probability.

The rhyme-as-reason effect, or Eaton–Rosen phenomenon, is a cognitive bias whereupon a saying or aphorism is judged as more accurate or truthful when it is rewritten to rhyme.

'Outcome primacy' is a psychological phenomenon that describes lasting effects on a subject's behavior based on the outcome of first experiences with a given task or decision. It was found that this outcome primacy can account for much of the underweighting of rare events in experience based decisions, where participants apparently underestimate small probabilities.

The illusory truth effect is the tendency to believe false information to be correct after repeated exposure. This phenomenon was first identified in a 1977 study at Villanova University and Temple University. When truth is assessed, people rely on whether the information is in line with their understanding or if it feels familiar. The first condition is logical, as people compare new information with what they already know to be true. Repetition makes statements easier to process relative to new, unrepeated statements, leading people to believe that the repeated conclusion is more truthful. The illusory truth effect has also been linked to hindsight bias, in which the recollection of confidence is skewed after the truth has been received.

Heuristics are simple decision making strategies used to achieve a specific goal quickly and efficiently, and are commonly implemented in sports.

Social heuristics are simple decision making strategies that guide people's behavior and decisions in the social environment when time, information, or cognitive resources are scarce. Social environments tend to be characterised by complexity and uncertainty, and in order to simplify the decision-making process, people may use heuristics, which are decision making strategies that involve ignoring some information or relying on simple rules of thumb.

Ecological rationality is a particular account of practical rationality, which in turn specifies the norms of rational action – what one ought to do in order to act rationally. The presently dominant account of practical rationality in the social and behavioral sciences such as economics and psychology, rational choice theory, maintains that practical rationality consists in making decisions in accordance with some fixed rules, irrespective of context. Ecological rationality, in contrast, claims that the rationality of a decision depends on the circumstances in which it takes place, so as to achieve one's goals in this particular context. What is considered rational under the rational choice account thus might not always be considered rational under the ecological rationality account. Overall, rational choice theory puts a premium on internal logical consistency whereas ecological rationality targets external performance in the world. The term ecologically rational is only etymologically similar to the biological science of ecology.

In behavioural sciences, social rationality is a type of decision strategy used in social contexts, in which a set of simple rules is applied in complex and uncertain situations.

The less-is-more effect refers to the finding that heuristic decision strategies can yield more accurate judgments than alternative strategies that use more pieces of information. Understanding these effects is part of the study of ecological rationality.

Intuitive statistics, or folk statistics, is the cognitive phenomenon where organisms use data to make generalizations and predictions about the world. This can be a small amount of sample data or training instances, which in turn contribute to inductive inferences about either population-level properties, future data, or both. Inferences can involve revising hypotheses, or beliefs, in light of probabilistic data that inform and motivate future predictions. The informal tendency for cognitive animals to intuitively generate statistical inferences, when formalized with certain axioms of probability theory, constitutes statistics as an academic discipline.

References

  1. ↑ "Center for Adaptive Rationality". www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de. Retrieved 9 September 2019.
  2. ↑ Hertwig, Ralph; Herzog, Stefan M.; Schooler, Lael J.; Reimer, Torsten (2008). "Fluency heuristic: A model of how the mind exploits a by-product of information retrieval". Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. 34 (5): 1191–1206. doi:10.1037/a0013025. hdl: 11858/00-001M-0000-0024-FC25-9 . PMID   18763900.
  3. ↑ Brandstätter, Eduard; Gigerenzer, Gerd; Hertwig, Ralph (2006). "The priority heuristic: Making choices without trade-offs". Psychological Review. 113 (2): 409–432. doi:10.1037/0033-295x.113.2.409. PMC   2891015 . PMID   16637767.
  4. ↑ Hertwig, Ralph; Pleskac, Timothy J. (2010). "Decisions from experience: Why small samples?". Cognition. 115 (2): 225–237. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2009.12.009. hdl: 11858/00-001M-0000-002E-5786-D . PMID   20092816. S2CID   15918980.
  5. ↑ Hertwig, Ralph; Davis, Jennifer Nerissa; Sulloway, Frank J. (2002). "Parental investment: How an equity motive can produce inequality". Psychological Bulletin. 128 (5): 728–745. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.128.5.728. hdl: 11858/00-001M-0000-0025-913B-1 . PMID   12206192.
  6. ↑ Beglinger, Bettina; Rohacek, Martin; Ackermann, Selina; Hertwig, Ralph; Karakoumis-Ilsemann, Julia; Boutellier, Susanne; Geigy, Nicolas; Nickel, Christian; Bingisser, Roland (2015). "Physicianʼs First Clinical Impression of Emergency Department Patients with Nonspecific Complaints is Associated with Morbidity and Mortality". Medicine. 94 (7): e374. doi: 10.1097/MD.0000000000000374 . PMC   4554174 . PMID   25700307.
  7. ↑ Hertwig, Ralph; Herzog, Stefan M. (2009). "Fast and Frugal Heuristics: Tools of Social Rationality". Social Cognition. 27 (5): 661–698. doi:10.1521/soco.2009.27.5.661. hdl: 11858/00-001M-0000-002E-576B-B .
  8. ↑ Tversky, Amos; Kahneman, Daniel (1983). "Extensional versus intuitive reasoning: The conjunction fallacy in probability judgment". Psychological Review. 90 (4): 293–315. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.90.4.293.
  9. ↑ Hertwig, R. (1995). Why Dr Gould's Homunculus doesn't think like Dr Gould: The "conjunction fallacy" reconsidered, Doctoral dissertation, Universität Konstanz: Germany. Konstanz: Hartung-Gorre Verlag.
  10. ↑ Hertwig, Ralph; Gigerenzer, Gerd (1999). "The 'conjunction fallacy' revisited: How intelligent inferences look like reasoning errors". Journal of Behavioral Decision Making. 12 (4): 275–305. doi:10.1002/(sici)1099-0771(199912)12:4<275::aid-bdm323>3.0.co;2-m. hdl: 11858/00-001M-0000-0025-9EBC-6 .
  11. ↑ "Lael Schooler". www.thecollege.syr.edu. Retrieved 9 September 2019.
  12. ↑ Schooler, Lael J.; Hertwig, Ralph (2005). "How forgetting aids heuristic inference". Psychological Review. 112 (3): 610–628. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.112.3.610. hdl: 11858/00-001M-0000-0025-838B-B . PMID   16060753.
  13. ↑ Hertwig, Ralph; Barron, Greg; Weber, Elke U.; Erev, Ido (2004). "Decisions from Experience and the Effect of Rare Events in Risky Choice". Psychological Science. 15 (8): 534–539. doi:10.1111/j.0956-7976.2004.00715.x. hdl: 11858/00-001M-0000-002E-57CE-F . PMID   15270998. S2CID   12977034.
  14. ↑ Wulff, Dirk U.; Mergenthaler-Canseco, Max; Hertwig, Ralph (2018). "A meta-analytic review of two modes of learning and the description-experience gap". Psychological Bulletin. 144 (2): 140–176. doi:10.1037/bul0000115. hdl: 21.11116/0000-0000-AD63-E . PMID   29239630.
  15. ↑ Dai, Junyi; Pachur, Thorsten; Pleskac, Timothy J.; Hertwig, Ralph (2019). "What the Future Holds and When: A Description–Experience Gap in Intertemporal Choice". Psychological Science. 30 (8): 1218–1233. doi:10.1177/0956797619858969. hdl: 21.11116/0000-0003-8E07-6 . PMID   31318637. S2CID   197663746.
  16. ↑ Hightow, Lisa B.; Miller, William C.; Leone, Peter A.; Wohl, David; Smurzynski, Marlene; Kaplan, Andrew H. (2003). "Failure to Return for HIV Posttest Counseling in an STD Clinic Population". AIDS Education and Prevention. 15 (3): 282–290. doi:10.1521/aeap.15.4.282.23826. PMID   12866839.
  17. ↑ "Christoph Engel". www.coll.mpg.de. Retrieved 9 September 2019.
  18. ↑ Hertwig, Ralph; Engel, Christoph (2016). "Homo Ignorans". Perspectives on Psychological Science. 11 (3): 359–372. doi:10.1177/1745691616635594. hdl: 11858/00-001M-0000-002A-C462-8 . PMID   27217249. S2CID   27556679.
  19. ↑ Hertwig, R., & Engel, C. (Eds.) (in press). Deliberate ignorance: Choosing not to know. Strüngmann Forum Reports. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  20. ↑ Thaler, R., & Sunstein, C. R. (2008). Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth and happiness. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.
  21. ↑ Finkel, Eli J.; Slotter, Erica B.; Luchies, Laura B.; Walton, Gregory M.; Gross, James J. (2013). "A Brief Intervention to Promote Conflict Reappraisal Preserves Marital Quality over Time". Psychological Science. 24 (8): 1595–1601. doi:10.1177/0956797612474938. PMID   23804960. S2CID   2254080.
  22. ↑ "Till Grüne-Yanoff". www.kth.se. Retrieved 9 September 2019.
  23. ↑ Hertwig, Ralph; Grüne-Yanoff, Till (2017). "Nudging and Boosting: Steering or Empowering Good Decisions". Perspectives on Psychological Science. 12 (6): 973–986. doi:10.1177/1745691617702496. hdl: 11858/00-001M-0000-002E-8D6F-D . PMID   28792862. S2CID   25989965.
  24. ↑ Hertwig, Ralph (2017). "When to consider boosting: Some rules for policy-makers". Behavioural Public Policy. 1 (2): 143–161. doi: 10.1017/bpp.2016.14 . hdl: 11858/00-001M-0000-002E-22B3-3 .
  25. ↑ Dallacker, M.; Hertwig, R.; Mata, J. (2018). "The frequency of family meals and nutritional health in children: A meta-analysis". Obesity Reviews. 19 (5): 638–653. doi:10.1111/obr.12659. hdl: 21.11116/0000-0001-5197-9 . PMID   29334693. S2CID   4855616.
  26. ↑ Hoffrage, U.; Lindsey, S.; Hertwig, R.; Gigerenzer, G. (2000). "MEDICINE: Communicating Statistical Information". Science. 290 (5500): 2261–2262. doi:10.1126/science.290.5500.2261. hdl: 11858/00-001M-0000-0025-9B18-3 . PMID   11188724. S2CID   33050943.
  27. ↑ Kurvers, Ralf H. J. M.; Herzog, Stefan M.; Hertwig, Ralph; Krause, Jens; Carney, Patricia A.; Bogart, Andy; Argenziano, Giuseppe; Zalaudek, Iris; Wolf, Max (2016). "Boosting medical diagnostics by pooling independent judgments". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 113 (31): 8777–8782. Bibcode:2016PNAS..113.8777K. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1601827113 . PMC   4978286 . PMID   27432950.
  28. ↑ "DGPs: Frühere Jahre". www.dgps.de. Retrieved 23 July 2019.
  29. ↑ "DGPs: Laudatio Prof. Dr. Ralph Hertwig". www.dgps.de. Retrieved 23 July 2019.
  30. ↑ "List of Members". www.leopoldina.org. Retrieved 23 July 2019.
  31. ↑ "A Conversation with Ralph Hertwig". Aps Observer. 30. 30 November 2017. Retrieved 23 July 2019.
  32. ↑ "Wilhelm Wundt Gesellschaft – Mietglieder". www.wilhelm-wundt-gesellschaft.de. Retrieved 23 July 2019.
  33. ↑ "DFG, German Research Foundation – Prof. Dr. Ralph Hertwig". www.dfg.de. Retrieved 23 July 2019.
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