4 Instead of relying on unrealistic optimization models and striving to compute optimal solutions for a given task, so he argued,

people use simple strategies, seeking solutions that are good enough with respect to an organism’s goals. He also stressed that behavior and performance result from both cognition and an organism’s environment (Box 1): “Human Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical rational behavior … is shaped by a scissors whose two blades are the structure of task environments and the computational capabilities of the actor“ (p 7).5 Box 1: In the literature, a connection between the heuristicsand-biases view and Simon’s concept of bounded rationality is often invoked. However, although Kahneman et al3 credited Simon in the preface

to their anthology (“Judgment under uncertainty: heuristics and biases”), their major early papers, Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical which appear in the same volume, do not cite Simon’s work on bounded rationality. Thus, the connection between heuristics-and-biases and bounded rationality was possibly made in hindsight.61 Embracing this emphasis on simple Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical decision strategies and their fit to the environment, the fast-and-frugal heuristics framework6,7 has developed an ecological view of rationality through which it tries to understand how and when people’s reliance on simple decision heuristics can result in smart behavior. In this view, heuristics

can be ecologically rational with Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical respect to the environment and the goals of the actor. Here, being rational means that a heuristic is successful with regard to some outside criterion, such as making a decision accurately and quickly when a patient is rushed into the emergency room. Hammond8 called such outside Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical criteria correspondence criteria, as opposed to coherence criteria, which are based on unboundedly rational optimization models as a normative yardstick for rationality. For instance, while physicians’ decisions in Figure 2 appear to be systematically biased towards mistakenly assigning healthy patients to the coronary care unit, these decisions over might in fact be viewed as ecologically rational, as the following court trial illustrates. In 2003, Daniel Merenstein,9 a family physician in Virginia, USA, was sued because he had Antidiabetic Compound Library concentration informed a patient about the pros and cons of PSA (prostate-specific antigen) tests, instead of just ordering one. Given that there is no evidence that the test does more good than harm, he had followed the recommendations of leading medical organizations and informed his patient, upon which the man declined to take the test. The patient later developed an incurable form of prostate cancer, and Merenstein was sued. The jury at the court exonerated him, but found his residency liable for $1 million.