A collection of Gigerenzer's important papers on rationality, heuristics, and rituals.

Where do new ideas come from? What is social intelligence? Why do social scientists perform mindless statistical rituals? This vital book is about rethinking rationality as adaptive thinking: to understand how minds cope with their environments, both ecological and social. Gerd Gigerenzer proposes and illustrates a bold new research program that investigates the psychology of rationality, introducing the concepts of ecological, bounded, and social rationality. His path-breaking collection takes research on thinking, social intelligence, creativity, and decision-making out of an ethereal world where the laws of logic and probability reign, and places it into our real world of human behavior and interaction. Adaptive Thinking is accessibly written for general readers with an interest in psychology, cognitive science, economics, sociology, philosophy, artificial intelligence, and animal behavior. It also teaches a practical audience, such as physicians, AIDS counselors, and experts in criminal law, how to understand and communicate uncertainties and risks.

PART ONE: WHERE DO NEW IDEAS COME FROM?
Introduction
1. From tools to theories: A heuristic of discovery
2. Mind as computer: The social origin of a metaphor
3. Ideas in exile: The struggles of an upright man
PART TWO: ECOLOGICAL RATIONALITY
Introduction
4. Ecological Intelligence
5. AIDS counselling for low-risk clients
6. How to improve Bayesian reasoning without instruction
PART FOUR: BOUNDED RATIONALITY
7. Probabilistic mental models
8. Reasoning the fast and frugal way
PART FOUR: SOCIAL RATIONALITY
9. Rationality: Why social context matters
10. Domain-specific reasoning: Social contracts and cheater detection
11. The modularity of social intelligence
PART FIVE: ILLUSIONS AND RITUALS
12. How to make cognitive illusions disappear
13. The Superego, the Ego, and the Id in statistical reasoning
14. Surrogates for theories
Index