CONCEPT

Ecological Rationality

Gigerenzer's doctrine that a cognitive strategy is never rational or irrational in isolation—only rational in relation to an environment—which dissolves the question of whether machines are “smarter” than humans by showing there is no environment-free scale on which intelligence can be ranked.

Ecological rationality is Gerd Gigerenzer's most original and most consequential idea: the claim that rationality is not a property of a decision strategy considered in isolation, the way sharpness is a property of a blade, but a property of the match between a strategy and the environment in which it operates. A heuristic that exploits a real regularity in the environment will succeed; one that assumes a regularity that is not there will fail; and the work of rationality science is therefore to map environmental structures and identify which strategies fit which structures, rather than to measure how far real reasoners deviate from abstract logical norms. The recognition heuristic—choose the option you recognize over the one you don't—is ecologically rational in an environment where larger cities are more frequently mentioned in the media and therefore more likely to be recognized, because in that environment recognition correlates with size. Change the environment, sever the

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