Gerd Gigerenzer

Gerd Gigerenzer arrived at the study of human reason from an unfashionable direction: while the dominant program in cognitive psychology was cataloguing the ways the human mind fails, he became convinced that the catalogue was measuring the wrong thing. Born in Bavaria in 1947 and trained at Munich, he eventually became director of the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, where he spent a half-century building the case that what looks like irrationality in the laboratory is often intelligence judged against a standard the world itself does not honor. His career-defining insight is the distinction between risk—where all possible outcomes and their probabilities are known, as in a casino—and uncertainty—where they are not, as in a marriage, a market, or a pandemic. The mathematics that governs the first situation does not govern the second, and the catastrophe of modern decision theory, in Gigerenzer's telling, was to treat all of