Team

Karin Binder – LINK

Joachim Engel – LINK

Ulrich Hoffrage – LINK

Cesare Martignon – LINK

Laura Martignon – LINK

Shabnam Mousavi – LINK

Francisco Vargas – LINK

Links between Bounded Rationality and Education have been particularly strong during the last decades. Indeed, the Enlightenment view of rational human minds reasoning, making decisions and solving problems based on logic and probabilities, was shaken during the second half of the twentieth century. Cognitive psychologists and economists discovered that humans’thoughts and actions often deviate from rules imposed by strict normative theories of inference.

These discoveries have an impact on Education. So called “errors”, a fundamental phenomenon in education, should be analysed from this perspective: as the results on Bounded Rationality have demonstrated, many deviations may be either valid heuristics that succeed in the environments in which humans have evolved, or biases that are caused by a lack of adaptation to abstract information formats. Humans, as the cognitive psychologist and economist Herbert Simon claimed, do not usually optimize, but rather satisfice, even when solving problem.