The ecological rationality of mechanisms evolved to make up minds

Selective pressures favoring rapid decisions would have led to the evolutio n of simple decision-making mechanisms that could take the form of heuristi cs and rules that use as little available information as possible. Such dec ision heuristics can only be ecologically rational-yielding accurate infere nces in particular problem domains-is they exploit the way that information is structured in the environment. The author presents a variety of fast an d frugal heuristics that are ecologically rational and shows how they cart be organized in the mind's adaptive toolbox of decision-making strategies.