Ecological Rationality

Models of ecological rationality describe the structure and representation of information in actual environments and their match with mental strategies such as boundedly rational heuristics. To the degree that such a match exists, heuristics need not trade accuracy for speed and frugality: investing less effort can also improve accuracy.

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 adaption of mental and social strategies to real-world environments rather than compare human judgment t the laws of logic and probability theory.