Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious

Guest Speaker: Gerd Gigerenzer, Max Planck Institute for Human Development Director Date: February 8th, 2008 Location: Calit2 Auditorium, Atkinson Hall, UCSD [webcast] Host: Mathew McCubbins, BSCS3 [event website]

DESCRIPTION/ABSTRACT: We think of intelligence as a deliberate, conscious activity guided by the laws of logic. Yet much of our mental life is unconscious, based on processes alien to logic: gut feelings, or intuitions. I argue that intuition is more than impulse and caprice; it has its own rationale. This can be described by fast and frugal heuristics, which exploit evolved abilities in our brain. Heuristics ignore information and try to focus on the few important reasons. More information, more time, even more thinking, are not always better, and less can be more. Speaker's website: http://mpibweb.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/curriculum_vitae/lang/en/id_name/gigerenzer/index.mpi SPEAKER BIO: Gerd Gigerenzer is Director of the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany and former Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago. He won the AAAS Prize for the best article in the behavioral sciences. He is the author of Calculated Risks: How To Know When Numbers Deceive You, the German translation of which won the Scientific Book of the Year Prize in 2002. He has also published two academic books on heuristics, Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart (with Peter Todd & The ABC Research Group) and Bounded Rationality: The Adaptive Toolbox with Reinhard Selten, a Nobel laureate in economics. MORE INFORMATION: For more information, contact Sarah Prom at sprom@soe.ucsd.edu.