Gerd Gigerenzer is a member of a growing cadre of psychologists researching the nature of human cognition and decision-making in the real world. Moving beyond simple learning theory and associationism, Gigerenzer has focused on how human beings develop strategies for making complex decisions. These decision heuristics are based on extracting salient features from the environment in order to increase speed and accuracy in decision-making. Ecological rationality is Gigerenzer’s term for the process of identifying the patterns in our environment that result in a heuristic’s success or failure. In his book, Risk Savvy: How to Make Good Decisions, Gigerenzer shares how we can improve our decision-making capacities.
In Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious, Gigerenzer presents his research in an accessible manner. This research has been popularized in books such as Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell.
Gigerenzer has also looked at moral decision-making and what is known as moral intuition as a type of cognitive heuristic. His ideas about moral intuition are summarized in his chapter, Moral Intuition = Fast and Frugal Heuristics?, in Moral Psychology, Volume 2—The Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition and Diversity.
The Go Cognitive website focuses on cognitive neuroscience and includes information from Gerd Gigerenzer that explains how heuristics function in decision-making.