ABSTRACT
Gerd Gigerenzer and his colleagues have contended that individuals have limited cognitive capacity, and are unable or unwilling to utilize complex statistical methods in decision making. Thus, individuals use heuristics in order to approximate “optimal” strategies more quickly, and at a much lower cognitive cost; hence the term “fast and frugal”. The simplest of these heuristics is the recognition heuristic (RH). D. G. Goldstein and Gigerenzer clearly assert that the level of recognition is not important in using RH, “the distinction relevant for the recognition heuristic is that between unrecognized objects and everything else”. Individuals appear to make attributions about their mental state of recognition, and perform some kind of Bayesian discounting based upon that attribution. While it is beyond the scope of this abstract to discuss the mechanism thoroughly, it is clear that RH may not be as fast or frugal as it was originally postulated.
