Classification in the Wild
  • Published: 4 May 2021
  • ISBN: 9780262045155
  • Imprint: MIT Press Academic
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 200
  • RRP: $85.00

Classification in the Wild

The Science and Art of Transparent Decision Making

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Rules for building formal models that use fast-and-frugal heuristics, extending the psychological study of classification to the real world of uncertainty.

Rules for building formal models that use fast-and-frugal heuristics, extending the psychological study of classification to the real world of uncertainty.

This book focuses on classification--allocating objects into categories--"in the wild," in real-world situations and far from the certainty of the lab. In the wild, unlike in typical psychological experiments, the future is not knowable and uncertainty cannot be meaningfully reduced to probability. Connecting the science of heuristics with machine learning, the book shows how to create formal models using classification rules that are simple, fast, and transparent and that can be as accurate as mathematically sophisticated algorithms developed for machine learning.
  • Published: 4 May 2021
  • ISBN: 9780262045155
  • Imprint: MIT Press Academic
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 200
  • RRP: $85.00
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About the authors

Gerd Gigerenzer

Gerd Gigerenzer is Director of the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and former Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books on heuristics and decision-making, including Reckoning with Risk.

Praise for Classification in the Wild

"Reflection and reason are overrated, according to renowned psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer. Much better qualified to help us make decisions is the cognitive, emotional, and social repertoire we call intuition, a suite of gut feelings that have evolved over the millennia specifically for making decisions. Gladwell drew heavily on Gigerenzer's research. But Gigerenzer goes a step further by explaining just why our gut instincts are so often right. Intuition, it seems, is not some sort of mystical chemical reaction but a neurologically based behavior that evolved to ensure that we humans respond quickly when faced with a dilemma." -- BusinessWeek
"Before his research, this was a topic dismissed as crazed superstition. Gigerenzer is able to show how aspects of intuition work and how ordinary people successfully use it in modern life." -- The New York Times
"Gigerenzer's theories about the usefulness of mental shortcuts were a small but crucial element of Malcolm Gladwell's bestseller Blink, and that attention has provided the psychologist, who is the director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, the opportunity to recast his academic research for a general audience." -- Publisher's Weekly