• Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Rational Use of Cognitive Resources

The Rational Use of Cognitive Resources

Hardcover

CognitionGeneral ComputersGeneral Psychology

ISBN10: 069125995X
ISBN13: 9780691259956
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: Feb 17 2026
Pages: 280
Weight: 1.24
Height: 0.75 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English

A new approach to understanding irrational behavior and modeling human cognition

What does it mean to act rationally? Mathematicians, economists, and statisticians have argued that a rational actor chooses actions that maximize their expected utility. By this standard, people routinely behave irrationally--and psychologists have amassed long lists of cognitive biases and heuristics to explain why. This book suggests a different approach: resource-rational analysis. With finite time and brain power, it is often unrealistic to consider all the options or determine the exact expected utility of any one of them. By reframing questions of rational action in terms of how we should make the best use of our limited cognitive resources, the book offers a new take on fundamental questions at the heart of cognitive psychology, behavioral economics, and the design of artificial intelligence systems.

The book presents a formal framework for applying resource-rational analysis to understand and improve human behavior, a set of tools developed by the authors to make this easier, and examples of how they have used this approach to revisit classic questions about human cognition, pose new ones, and enhance human rationality. The book will be a valuable resource for psychologists, economists, and philosophers as well as neuroscientists studying human brains and minds and computer scientists working to reproduce such systems in machines.

1 different editions

Also available

Also from

Lieder, Falk

Also in

Cognition