260056 Heuristics in Decision-Making [*H*] (S) (SoSe 2025)

Philosophers have often tended to think of rational decision-making as a conscious process, and of good reasoning on the model of internal speech. When I make a decision, I should be able to tell you the reasons for my decision, as though I had just said them to myself. A great deal of our decision-making seems to be intuitive, however. When I listen to you speak, I don’t consciously identify the syntactic structure of your sentences, pair the words with meanings, and then derive the meaning of the sentence compositionally, as compositional semantics tells us I must. You speak and I just hear what you say. Even mathematics, a paradigm of human rationality is interwoven with intuition. It’s difficult for a lot of people to say what they do when they engage in even a simple mathematical operation, like adding 7 to 8, not to mention the creative intuitive work of expert mathematicians.

Some psychologists have suggested an alternative model of human decision-making: that our decisions are often based on the use of ‘fast and frugal’ heuristics: processes that are quick to implement but often deliver incorrect answers to our questions. For example, suppose that you are deciding whether to buy a new phone. One costs 300 EUR, one costs 500 EUR, and one costs 800 EUR. We might think that you’ll make your decision based purely on, e.g., which phone is best value for money. Research suggests, however, that our decisions might be based on less obviously rational factors. One is anchoring in which our decisions are based on an initial piece of information we receive: an anchor. If the first phone you look at costs 800 EUR, then the 500 EUR phone might seem cheap in comparison but if the first phone you look at costs 300 EUR, then it might seem expensive. Anchoring might be useful in a lot of contexts. I can get a pretty good estimate of someone else's height by anchoring on my own height and then adjusting based on, e.g., how I have to adjust my gaze to look them in the eye. Such processes are fallible, however, and can be exploited (supposedly this is the reason that Roles Royce like to exhibit their new cars at airshows rather than carshows).

In this seminar, we’ll consider the evidence for this heuristic approach to human decision-making, whether heuristic processes are rational, and what lessons we can draw for the study of philosophical questions.

Requirements for participation, required level

Abschluss des ersten Studienjahres (beide Grundkurse, Philosophischer Einstieg und Philosophisches Schreiben), sofern Sie den Kurs nicht als Handwerksseminar besuchen.