ABSTRACT
Every day, throughout our lives, we are faced by the need to make a plethora of decisions, choices and judgements: what to have for lunch, where to go on holiday, what car to buy, whom to hire for a new faculty position, whom to marry, etc. Such examples illustrate the abundance of decisions in our lives and thus the importance of understanding the how and why of decision-making. Highlighting this range of situations emphasises the huge diversity of cognitive activities that are grouped under the general heading ``decision-making''. Given such diversity, any theoretical perspective clearly needs to be wide-ranging in its purview, and readily adaptable to a variety of tasks and conditions. How can such scope and adaptability be achieved? In this chapter we examine a framework that claims to be capable of achieving precisely this, while retaining psychological plausibility. The key, according to its proponents, lies in a ``collection of specialised cognitive mechanisms, that evolution has built into the mind, for speci®c domains of inference and reasoning'' (Gigerenzer & Todd, 1999, p. 30). This chapter takes the following form: First we review the background and claims for such an adaptive toolbox, then we present summaries of empirical tests of some of the proposed tools of decision-making, and ®nally we sketch an alternative domain-free perspective, which, we argue, provides a better and more parsimonious account of the cognitive mechanisms underlying our judgements and decisions.
