Key Concepts

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz had a beautiful dream.  He hoped to reduce rational reasoning to a universal calculus, which he termed the Universal Characteristic.  By around 1840, mathematicians had given up as thankless and even antimathematical the task of reducing rationality to a calculus.  Psychologists and economists have not. 

The ABC program explores an exciting and very different perspective on rationality. Our perspective questions the familiar one we know from the many stories in cognitive science and economics, which often implicitly assume that humans and animals have unlimited time, knowledge, and operate according to the laws of logic and probability theory. The land of rationality we set out to explore is, in contrast, inhabited by people endowed with only limited time, information, and computational capacities with which to make inferences about the world. The notions of bounded, ecological, and social rationality are our guides to understanding how humble humans survive without following the heavenly rules of rational choice theory.

Bounded Rationality
Models of bounded rationality attempt to answer the question of how people with limited time and resources make decisions. This program is an alternative to the dominant optimization paradigm in cognitive science, economics, and behavioral biology that poses the question of how near omniscient beings would behave. We study the proximal mechanisms of bounded rationality, that is, the adaptive heuristics that enable quick and frugal decisions under uncertainty. This collection of heuristics and their building blocks is what we call the adaptive toolbox. 		 
     
Ecological Rationality
Models of ecological rationality describe the structure and representation of information in actual environments and their match with mental strategies, such as cognitive heuristics. To the degree that such a match exists, heuristics need not trade accuracy for speed and frugality. The simultaneous focus on the mind and its environment, past and present, puts research on decision making under uncertainty into an evolutionary and ecological framework, a framework that is missing in most theories of reasoning, both descriptive and normative. In short, we study the adaptation of mental and social strategies to real-world environments rather than compare strategies to the laws of logic and probability theory. 		   
     
Social Rationality
Social rationality is a variant of ecological rationality, one for which the environment is social rather than physical or technical. Models of social rationality describe the structure of social environments and their match with boundedly rational strategies that people might use. There is a variety of goals and heuristics unique to social environments. That is, in addition to the goals that define ecological rationality—to make fast, frugal, and fairly accurate decisions—social rationality is concerned with goals, such as choosing an option that one can defend with argument or moral justification, or that can create a consensus. To a much higher degree than for the purely cognitive focus of most research on bounded rationality, socially adaptive heuristics include emotions and social norms that can act as heuristic principles for decision making. 		 
       
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