Selective pressures favoring rapid decisions would have led to the evolution of simple decision-making mechanisms that could take the form of heuristics and rules that use as little available information as possible. Such decision heuristics can only be ecologically rational—yielding accurate inferences in particular problem domains—if they exploit the way that information is structured in the environment. The author presents a variety of fast and frugal heuristics that are ecologically rational and shows how they can be organized in the mind's adaptive toolbox of decision-making strategies.
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