Simple rules that deliberately ignore information can beat complex models where uncertainty is high and data are thin.
Gigerenzer's recognition heuristic: asked which German city is larger, American students outperformed German students by recognising fewer names. The ignorance was doing the work.
In practice
- A triage nurse using three questions sorts patients as accurately as a scoring model with fourteen inputs.
- A recruiter using one strong signal and ignoring the rest matches the panel's outcome and takes a tenth of the time.
- Standing
- The principal rival to the heuristics-and-biases programme, treating heuristics as adaptive rather than defective.
- Subject
- Decision-making & Reasoning
- Essay
- Why reasoning works the way it does