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Ecological Rationality Intelligence in the World 1st
Edition Peter M. Todd Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Peter M. Todd, Gerd Gigerenzer
ISBN(s): 9780195315448, 0195315448
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 2.27 MB
Year: 2012
Language: english
Ecological Rationality
Intelligence in the World
EVOLUTION AND COGNITION

General Editor: Stephen Stich, Rutgers University

Published in the Series

Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart
Gerd Gigerenzer, Peter M. Todd, and the ABC Research Group

Natural Selection and Social Theory: Selected Papers of Robert

Trivers
Robert Trivers

Adaptive Thinking: Rationality in the Real World

Gerd Gigerenzer

In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion

Scott Atran

The Origin and Evolution of Cultures

Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson

The Innate Mind: Structure and Contents

Peter Carruthers, Stephen Laurence, and Stephen Stich, Eds.
The Innate Mind, Volume 2: Culture and Cognition
Peter Carruthers, Stephen Laurence, and Stephen Stich, Eds.

The Innate Mind, Volume 3: Foundations and the Future

Peter Carruthers, Stephen Laurence, and Stephen Stich, Eds.
Why Humans Cooperate: A Cultural and Evolutionary
Explanation
Natalie Henrich and Joseph Henrich

Rationality for Mortals: How People Cope with Uncertainty

Gerd Gigerenzer

Ecological Rationality: Intelligence in the World

Peter M. Todd, Gerd Gigerenzer, and the ABC Research Group
Ecological Rationality

Intelligence in the World

Peter M. Todd
Gerd Gigerenzer
and the ABC Research Group

1
1
Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further
Oxford University’s objective of excellence
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Copyright © 2012 by Peter M. Todd and Gerd Gigerenzer

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ecological rationality : intelligence in the world / edited by Peter M. Todd
and Gerd Gigerenzer.
p. cm. — (Evolution and cognition series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-531544-8
1. Environmental psychology. 2. Heuristic. 3. Reason. I. Todd, Peter M.
II. Gigerenzer, Gerd.
BF353.E28 2011
153—dc23
2011040733

987654321
Printed in USA
on acid-free paper
Dedicated to Herbert Simon and Reinhard Selten, who pioneered
the study of rationality in the real world.
This page intentionally left blank
 Preface

T welve years ago, we invited readers to participate in a journey

into largely unknown territory. With this call, we began our book,
Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart. The invitation still stands,
but the territory is no longer quite so unknown, and some of the
formerly blank spaces on the map have been replaced by clear
contours. This progress is due to a large number of researchers from
many disciplines who followed our call and put their expertise to
work to explore the land of rationality occupied by real people
who have only limited time, knowledge, and computational capac-
ities. For instance, researchers on memory have discovered why
and when a beneficial degree of forgetting can lead to better infer-
ences about the world; researchers in business have found out that
managers rely on one-reason heuristics to predict consumer behav-
ior better than costly, complex statistical methods; and philoso-
phers have begun to debate what responsibility and morality mean
in an uncertain world where epistemic laziness—relying on lim-
ited information—can lead to better judgments.
Ecological Rationality focuses on a central and challenging
aspect of this exploration: understanding rationality as a match
between mind and environment. Before Simple Heuristics, a largely
unquestioned view was that humans and other animals rely on
heuristics, but that they would do better if they would process
viii PREFACE

information in a “rational” way, identified variously with proposi-

tional logic, Bayesian probability updating, or the maximization of
expected utility. In contrast, we argued in Simple Heuristics that
there is no single rational tool for all human tasks, based on some
logical principle, but an adaptive toolbox with specific tools imple-
menting bounded rationality, each tool based on mental core capac-
ities. As a consequence, the proper questions are which tools work
well in a given environment, and why. These are the questions of
ecological rationality that we explore in this book. The vision of
rationality is not logical, but ecological.
The environment is crucial for understanding the mind. Herbert
Simon drew attention to this with his metaphor of rationality
emerging from the interaction of two blades of a pair of scissors,
one representing the mental capacities of the actor and the other
the characteristics of the environment. We add “ecological” to
“rationality” to highlight the importance of that second blade,
which is all too often overlooked. This is also the reason for the
subtitle of this book: Intelligent behavior in the world comes about
by exploiting reliable structure in the world—and hence, some of
intelligence is in the world itself.
We set out on this journey as a group of individuals trained in a
number of disciplines, including psychology, economics, mathe-
matics, computer science, biology, business, philosophy, the law,
medicine, and engineering. That this interdisciplinary collabora-
tion has been working and thriving over more than a decade is a
tribute to the young researchers who were willing to take off their
disciplinary blinders and look around and build on what others
brought to the party. The exploration has also flourished under the
generous long-term funding provided by the unique vision of the
Max Planck Society. Much of the work reported in this volume was
carried out at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in
Berlin, and also by colleagues who joined in the journey after
spending time with us talking, debating, and enjoying getting
together every afternoon at four o’clock for coffee and exploration.
The exploration done since the publication of Simple Heuristics
in fact takes several books to cover. Other volumes investigate
topics such as the role of emotions and culture in bounded rational-
ity (Gigerenzer & Selten, 2001), the role of heuristics in the making
of the law, in litigation, and in court (Gigerenzer & Engel, 2006), the
role of heuristics in intuition (Gigerenzer, 2007), and the founda-
tional work on fast and frugal heuristics (Gigerenzer, Hertwig, &
Pachur, 2011). The third volume in the triptych begun by Simple
Heuristics and this volume extends our exploration from bounded
rationality and ecological rationality to social rationality (Hertwig,
Hoffrage, & the ABC Research Group, in press).
 PREFACE ix

There are many people who have helped us in producing this

book. Special thanks go to Peter Carruthers, Stephen Lea, Lauri
Saaksvuori, and the students of Peter Todd’s Structure of Informa-
tion Environments course, all of whom read and commented on
chapters, to Marshall Fey for the image of the Liberty Bell slot
machine used in chapter 16, to Anita Todd and Rona Unrau for
their work in editing everyone’s writing over and over again, to
Doris Gampig for her help with indexing, and to Jürgen Rossbach
and Marianne Hauser for their exemplary work in creating our fig-
ures and graphics. Thanks also to the ever-growing extended ABC
group spread around the globe, for all of your input, insight, and
ideas. And thanks as ever to our families, who create the environ-
mental structure within which we thrive.
Finally, this book is an interim report of an ongoing research
program; for future developments and results, we invite you to visit
our centers’ websites at:
http://www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/en/research/adaptive-behavior-
and-cognition
http://www.indiana.edu/~abcwest

Bloomington and Berlin Peter M. Todd

October 2010 Gerd Gigerenzer
This page intentionally left blank
 Contents

The ABC Research Group xv

Part I The Research Agenda

1 What Is Ecological Rationality? 3
Peter M. Todd and Gerd Gigerenzer

Part II Uncertainty in the World

2 How Heuristics Handle Uncertainty 33
Henry Brighton and Gerd Gigerenzer
3 When Simple Is Hard to Accept 61
Robin M. Hogarth
4 Rethinking Cognitive Biases as Environmental
Consequences 80
Gerd Gigerenzer, Klaus Fiedler, and Henrik Olsson

Part III Correlations Between Recognition and the World

5 When Is the Recognition Heuristic an
Adaptive Tool? 113
Thorsten Pachur, Peter M. Todd, Gerd Gigerenzer, Lael J. Schooler,
and Daniel G. Goldstein
 xii CONTENTS

6 How Smart Forgetting Helps Heuristic Inference 144

Lael J. Schooler, Ralph Hertwig, and Stefan M. Herzog
7 How Groups Use Partial Ignorance to Make
Good Decisions 167
Konstantinos V. Katsikopoulos and Torsten Reimer

Part IV Redundancy and Variability in the World

8 Redundancy: Environment Structure That Simple
Heuristics Can Exploit 187
Jörg Rieskamp and Anja Dieckmann
9 The Quest for Take-the-Best: Insights and
Outlooks From Experimental Research 216
Arndt Bröder
10 Efficient Cognition Through Limited Search 241
Gerd Gigerenzer, Anja Dieckmann, and Wolfgang Gaissmaier
11 Simple Rules for Ordering Cues in One-Reason
Decision Making 274
Anja Dieckmann and Peter M. Todd

Part V Rarity and Skewness in the World

12 Why Rare Things Are Precious: How Rarity
Benefits Inference 309
Craig R. M. McKenzie and Valerie M. Chase
13 Ecological Rationality for Teams and Committees:
Heuristics in Group Decision Making 335
Torsten Reimer and Ulrich Hoffrage
14 Naïve, Fast, and Frugal Trees for Classification 360
Laura F. Martignon, Konstantinos V. Katsikopoulos,
and Jan K. Woike
15 How Estimation Can Benefit From an
Imbalanced World 379
Ralph Hertwig, Ulrich Hoffrage, and Rüdiger Sparr

Part VI Designing the World

16 Designed to Fit Minds: Institutions and
Ecological Rationality 409
Will M. Bennis, Konstantinos V. Katsikopoulos,
Daniel G. Goldstein, Anja Dieckmann, and Nathan Berg
17 Designing Risk Communication in Health 428
Stephanie Kurzenhäuser and Ulrich Hoffrage
 CONTENTS xiii

18 Car Parking as a Game Between Simple Heuristics 454

John M. C. Hutchinson, Carola Fanselow, and Peter M. Todd

Part VII Afterword

19 Ecological Rationality: The Normative
Study of Heuristics 487
Gerd Gigerenzer and Peter M. Todd

References 498
Name Index 552
Subject Index 567
This page intentionally left blank
 The ABC Research Group

The ABC Research Group is an interdisciplinary and international

collection of scientists studying the mechanisms of bounded
rationality and how good decisions can be made in an uncertain
world. Its home, the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition,
founded in 1995, is at the Max Planck Institute for Human
Development in Berlin, Germany.

Will M. Bennis Henry Brighton

University of New York Center for Adaptive Behavior and
in Prague Cognition
Legerova 72 Max Planck Institute for Human
120 00 Prague Development
Czech Republic Lentzeallee 94
[email protected] 14195 Berlin
Germany
Nathan Berg [email protected]
School of Economic, Political,
and Policy Sciences Arndt Bröder
University of Texas Universität Mannheim
at Dallas Lehrstuhl für Allgemeine Psychologie
800 W. Campbell Rd., GR31 Schloss, EO 265
Richardson, TX 75080-3021 68131 Mannheim
USA Germany
[email protected] [email protected]
xvi THE ABC RESEARCH GROUP

Valerie M. Chase Daniel G. Goldstein

Breisacherstrasse 35 Yahoo Research
4057 Basel 111 West 40th Street
Switzerland New York, NY 10018
USA
Anja Dieckmann [email protected]
GfK Group
Nordwestring 101 Ralph Hertwig
90419 Nürnberg Center for Cognitive and
Germany Decision Sciences
[email protected] Department of Psychology
University of Basel
Carola Fanselow Missionsstrasse 64a
Universität Potsdam 4055 Basel
Department Linguistik Switzerland
Haus 14/35 [email protected]
Karl-Liebknecht-Straße 24-25
14476 Potsdam Stefan Herzog
Germany Center for Cognitive and
[email protected] Decision Sciences
Department of Psychology
Klaus Fiedler University of Basel
Psychologisches Institut Missionsstrasse 64a
Universität Heidelberg 4055 Basel
Hauptsstrasse 47-51 Switzerland
69117 Heidelberg [email protected]
Germany
klaus.fiedler@psychologie. Ulrich Hoffrage
uni-heidelberg.de Faculty of Business and
Economics (HEC)
Wolfgang Gaissmaier University of Lausanne
Harding Center for Risk Literacy Quartier UNIL-Dorigny
Max Planck Institute for Human Bâtiment Internef
Development 1015 Lausanne
Lentzeallee 94 Switzerland
14195 Berlin [email protected]
Germany
[email protected] Robin M. Hogarth
Department of Economics &
Gerd Gigerenzer Business
Center for Adaptive Behavior and Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Cognition Ramon Trias Fargas, 25-27
Max Planck Institute for Human 08005 Barcelona
Development Spain
Lentzeallee 94 [email protected]
14195 Berlin
[email protected]
 THE ABC RESEARCH GROUP xvii

John M.C. Hutchinson Henrik Olsson

Senckenberg Museum für Center for Adaptive Behavior
Naturkunde Görlitz and Cognition
PF 300154 Max Planck Institute for Human
02806 Görlitz Development
Germany Lentzeallee 94
[email protected] 14195 Berlin
Germany
Konstantinos V. Katsikopoulos [email protected]
Center for Adaptive Behavior and
Cognition Thorsten Pachur
Max Planck Institute for Human Center for Cognitive and
Development Decision Sciences
Lentzeallee 94 Department of Psychology
14195 Berlin University of Basel
Germany Missionsstrasse 64a
[email protected] 4055 Basel
Switzerland
Stephanie Kurzenhäuser [email protected]
Center for Cognitive and Decision
Sciences Torsten Reimer
Department of Psychology Brian Lamb School of
University of Basel Communication and Department
Missionsstrasse 64a of Psychological Sciences
4055 Basel Purdue University
Switzerland 100 North University Street
[email protected] West Lafayette, IN 47907-2098
USA
Laura F. Martignon [email protected]
Institute of Mathematics and
Computing Jörg Rieskamp
Ludwigsburg University Department of Psychology
of Education University of Basel
Reuteallee 46 Missionsstrasse 62a
71634 Ludwigsburg 4055 Basel
Germany Switzerland
[email protected] [email protected]
Craig R. M. McKenzie Lael J. Schooler
Rady School of Management and Center for Adaptive Behavior and
Department of Psychology Cognition
UC San Diego Max Planck Institute for Human
9500 Gilman Dr. Development
La Jolla, CA 92093-0553 Lentzeallee 94
USA 14195 Berlin
[email protected] Germany
[email protected]
xviii THE ABC RESEARCH GROUP

Rüdiger Sparr Jan K. Woike

Rohde & Schwarz SIT GmbH Faculty of Business and
Am Studio 3 Economics (HEC)
12489 Berlin University of Lausanne
Germany Quartier UNIL-Dorigny
[email protected] Bâtiment Internef
1015 Lausanne
Peter M. Todd Switzerland
Cognitive Science Program and [email protected]
School of Informatics and
Computing
Indiana University
1101 E. 10th Street
Bloomington, IN 47405
USA
[email protected]
Part I
THE RESEARCH AGENDA
This page intentionally left blank
 1
What Is Ecological Rationality?
Peter M. Todd
Gerd Gigerenzer

Human rational behavior...is shaped by a scissors whose

two blades are the structure of task environments and the
computational capabilities of the actor.
Herbert A. Simon

“
M ore information is always better, full information is best. More
computation is always better, optimization is best.” More-is-better
ideals such as these have long shaped our vision of rationality. The
philosopher Rudolf Carnap (1947), for instance, proposed the
“principle of total evidence,” which is the recommendation to use
all the available evidence when estimating a probability. The statis-
tician I. J. Good (1967) argued, similarly, that it is irrational to make
observations without using them. Going back further in time, the
Old Testament says that God created humans in his image (Genesis
1:26), and it might not be entirely accidental that some form of
omniscience (including knowledge of all relevant probabilities
and utilities) and omnipotence (including the ability to compute
complex functions in a blink) has sneaked into models of human
cognition. Many theories in the cognitive sciences and economics
have recreated humans in this heavenly image—from Bayesian
models to exemplar models to the maximization of expected utility.
Yet as far as we can tell, humans and other animals have always
relied on simple strategies or heuristics to solve adaptive problems,
ignoring most information and eschewing much computation
rather than aiming for as much as possible of both. In this book,
we argue that in an uncertain world, more information and com-
putation is not always better. Most important, we ask why and
when less can be more. The answers to this question constitute the
idea of ecological rationality, how we are able to achieve intelli-
gence in the world by using simple heuristics in appropriate con-
texts. Ecological rationality stems in part from the nature of those

3
4 THE RESEARCH AGENDA

heuristics, and in part from the structure of the environment: Our

intelligent, adaptive behavior emerges from the interaction of both
mind and world. Consider the examples of investment and sports.

Making Money
In 1990, Harry Markowitz received the Nobel Prize in Economics
for his path-breaking work on optimal asset allocation. He addressed
a vital investment problem that everyone faces in some form or
other, be it saving for retirement or earning money on the stock
market: How to invest your money in N available assets. It would
be risky to put everything in one basket; therefore, it makes sense
to diversify. But how? Markowitz (1952) derived the optimal rule
for allocating wealth across assets, known as the mean–variance
portfolio, because it maximizes the return (mean) and minimizes
the risk (variance). When considering his own retirement invest-
ments, we could be forgiven for imagining that Markowitz used his
award-winning optimization technique. But he did not. He relied
instead on a simple heuristic:

1/ N rule: Invest equally in each of the N alternatives.

Markowitz was not alone in using this heuristic; empirical stud-

ies indicate that about 50% of ordinary people intuitively rely on it
(Huberman & Jiang, 2006). But isn’t this rule naive and silly? Isn’t
optimizing always better? To answer these questions, a study com-
pared the 1/N rule with the mean–variance portfolio and 13 other
optimal asset allocation policies in seven investment problems,
such as allocating one’s money among 10 American industry funds
(DeMiguel, Garlappi, & Uppal, 2009). The optimizing models
included sophisticated Bayesian and non-Bayesian models, which
got 10 years of stock data to estimate their parameters for each
month of portfolio prediction and investment choices. The 1/N
rule, in contrast, ignores all past information. The performance of
all 15 strategies was evaluated by three standard financial measures,
and the researchers found that 1/N came out near the top of the
pack for two of them (in first place on certainty equivalent returns,
second on turnover, and fifth on the Sharpe ratio). Despite complex
estimations and computations, none of the optimization methods
could consistently earn better returns than the simple heuristic.
How can a simple heuristic outperform optimizing strategies?
Note that in an ideal world where the mean–variance portfolio
could estimate its parameters perfectly, that is, without error, it
would do best. But in an uncertain world, even with 10 years’ worth
of data, optimization no longer necessarily leads to the best out-
come. In an uncertain world, one needs to ignore information to
 WHAT IS ECOLOGICAL RATIONALITY? 5

make better decisions. Yet our point is not that simple heuristics
are better than optimization methods, nor the opposite, as is typi-
cally assumed. No heuristic or optimizing strategy is the best in all
worlds. Rather, we must always ask, in what environments does a
given heuristic perform better than a complex strategy, and when is
the opposite true? This is the question of the ecological rationality
of a heuristic. The answer requires analyzing the information-
processing mechanism of the heuristic, the information structures
of the environment, and the match between the two. For the choice
between 1/N and the mean–variance portfolio, the relevant envi-
ronmental features include (a) degree of uncertainty, (b) number
N of alternatives, and (c) size of the learning sample.
It is difficult to predict the future performance of funds because
uncertainty is high. The size of the learning sample is the estima-
tion window, with 5 to 10 years of data typically being used to cali-
brate portfolio models in investment practice. The 1/N rule tends to
outperform the mean–variance portfolio if uncertainty is high, the
number of alternatives is large, and the learning sample is small.
This qualitative insight allows us to ask a quantitative question: If
we have 50 alternatives, how large a learning sample do we need so
that the mean–variance portfolio eventually outperforms the simple
heuristic? The answer is: 500 years of stock data (DeMiguel et al.,
2009). Thus, if you started keeping track of your investments now,
in the 26th century optimization would finally pay off, assuming
that the same funds, and the stock market, are still around.

Catching Balls
Now let us think about sports, where players are also faced with
challenging, often emotionally charged problems. How do players
catch a fly ball? If you ask professional players, they may well stare
at you blankly and respond that they had never thought about it—
they just run to the ball and catch it. But how do players know
where to run? A standard account is that minds solve such complex
problems with complex algorithms. An obvious candidate complex
algorithm is that players unconsciously estimate the ball’s trajec-
tory and run as fast as possible to the spot where the ball will hit
the ground. How else could it work? In The Selfish Gene, biologist
Richard Dawkins (1989, p. 96) discusses exactly this:

When a man throws a ball high in the air and catches it again, he
behaves as if he had solved a set of differential equations in pre-
dicting the trajectory of the ball. He may neither know nor care
what a differential equation is, but this does not affect his skill
with the ball. At some subconscious level, something function-
ally equivalent to the mathematical calculation is going on.
6 THE RESEARCH AGENDA

Computing the trajectory of a ball is not a simple feat. Theoretically,

balls have parabolic trajectories. To select the right parabola, play-
ers would have to estimate the ball’s initial distance, initial veloc-
ity, and projection angle. Yet in the real world, balls do not fly in
parabolas, due to air resistance, wind, and spin. Thus, players’
brains would further need to estimate, among other things, the
speed and direction of the wind at each point of the ball’s flight, in
order to compute the resulting path and the point where the ball
will land. All this would have to be completed within a few sec-
onds—the time a ball is in the air. Note that Dawkins carefully
inserts the term “as if,” realizing that the estimations and computa-
tions cannot really be done consciously but suggesting that the
unconscious somehow does something akin to solving the differen-
tial equations. Yet the evidence does not support this view: In
experiments, players performed poorly in estimating where the ball
would strike the ground (Babler & Dannemiller, 1993; Saxberg,
1987; Todd, 1981). After all, if professional baseball players were
able to estimate the trajectory of each hit and know when it would
land out of reach, we would not see them running into walls, dug-
outs, and over the stands trying to catch fly balls.
As in the investment problem, we can take a different approach
and instead ask: Is there a simple heuristic that players use to
catch balls? Experimental studies have shown that experienced
players in fact use various rules of thumb. One of these is the gaze
heuristic, which works in situations where a ball is already high up
in the air:

Gaze heuristic: Fixate your gaze on the ball, start running, and
adjust your running speed so that the angle of gaze remains
constant.

The angle of gaze is the angle between the eye and the ball, rela-
tive to the ground. Players who use this rule do not need to measure
wind, air resistance, spin, or the other causal variables. They can
get away with ignoring all these pieces of causal information. All
the relevant facts are contained in only one variable: the angle of
gaze. Note that players using the gaze heuristic are not able to com-
pute the point at which the ball will land, just as demonstrated by
the experimental results. But the heuristic nevertheless leads them
to the landing point in time to make the catch.
Like the 1/N rule, the gaze heuristic is successful in a particular
class of situations, not in all cases, and the study of its ecological
rationality aims at identifying that class. As many ball players say,
the hardest ball to catch is the one that heads straight at you, a situ-
ation in which the gaze heuristic is of no use. As mentioned before,
the gaze heuristic works in situations where the ball is already high
 WHAT IS ECOLOGICAL RATIONALITY? 7

in the air, but it fails if applied right when the ball is at the begin-
ning of its flight. However, in this different environmental condi-
tion, players do not need a completely new heuristic—just a slightly
modified one, with a different final step (McBeath, Shaffer, & Kaiser,
1995; Shaffer, Krauchunas, Eddy, & McBeath, 2004):

Modified gaze heuristic: Fixate your gaze on the ball, start run-
ning, and adjust your running speed so that the image of the
ball rises at a constant rate.

The operation of this modified rule is intuitive: If players see the

ball appear to rise with accelerating gaze angle, they had better run
backward, because otherwise the ball will hit the ground behind
their present position. If, however, the ball rises with decreasing
apparent speed, they need to run toward it instead. Thus, different
but related rules apply in different situations—these are the kinds
of relationships that the study of ecological rationality aims to
reveal. As we will see, there is much work to be done—and many
approaches that can be applied—to reveal these relationships.
Unfortunately, we cannot simply ask the users of these rules: Most
fielders are blithely unaware of their reliance on the gaze heuristic,
despite its simplicity (McBeath et al., 1995; Shaffer & McBeath,
2005). Other heuristics such as the 1/N rule may be consciously
taught and applied, but without practitioners knowing why they
work, and when. We must explore to find out.

What Is a Heuristic?

As these examples illustrate, a heuristic is a strategy that ignores

available information. It focuses on just a few key pieces of data to
make a decision. Yet ignoring some information is exactly what is
needed for better (and faster) judgments, and in this book we inves-
tigate how and when this can be so. Heuristics are where the rubber
meets the road, or where the mind meets the environment, by guid-
ing action in the world. They process the patterns of information
available from the environment, via their building blocks based on
evolved capacities (described below), to produce goal-directed
behavior.
Humans and other animals use many types of heuristics to meet
the adaptive challenges they face. But each new task does not nec-
essarily demand a new heuristic: One heuristic can be useful for a
broad range of problems. The gaze heuristic, for instance, did not
evolve for the benefit of baseball and cricket outfielders. Intercepting
moving objects is an important adaptive task in human and animal
history. From fish to birds to bats, many animals are able to track an
8 THE RESEARCH AGENDA

object moving through three-dimensional space, which is an

evolved capacity necessary for executing the gaze heuristic. Some
teleost fish catch their prey by keeping a constant angle between
their own line of motion and that of their target; male hoverflies
intercept females in the same way for mating (Collett & Land, 1975).
And we can readily generalize the gaze heuristic from its evolution-
ary origins, such as in hunting, to ball games and other modern
applications. Sailors use the heuristic in a related way: If another
boat approaches and a collision might occur, then fixate your
eye on the other boat; if the bearing remains constant, turn away,
because otherwise a collision will occur. Again, these methods
are faster and more reliable than estimating the courses of two
moving objects and calculating whether there is an intersection
point. As we will see, simple rules are less prone to estimation and
calculation error and hence often more reliable in appropriate
situations.
Similarly, the 1/N rule is not just for making money. It is an
instance of a class of rules known as equality heuristics, which are
used to solve problems beyond financial investment. If you have
two or more children, how do you allocate your time and resources
among them? Many parents try to distribute their attention equally
among their N children (Hertwig, Davis, & Sulloway, 2002). Children
themselves often divide money equally among players in experi-
mental games such as the ultimatum game, a behavior that is not
predicted by game theory but is consistent with the human sense of
fairness and justice (Takezawa, Gummerum, & Keller, 2006).

Building Blocks of Heuristics

Most heuristics are made up of multiple building blocks. There are
a limited number of kinds of building blocks, including search
rules, stopping rules, and decision rules; by combining different
sets of these, many different heuristics can be constructed. For
instance, to choose a mate, a peahen does not investigate all pea-
cocks posing and displaying to get her attention, nor does she
weight and add all male features to calculate the one with the high-
est expected utility. Rather, she investigates only three or four and
picks the one with the largest number of eyespots (Petrie & Halliday,
1994). This mate choice heuristic is a form of satisficing (Table 1-1)
that consists of the simple search rule “investigate males in your
proximity,” the stopping rule “stop search after a sample of four,”
and the decision rule “choose on the basis of one cue (number of
eyespots).” Given a particular heuristic, changing one or more of its
building blocks allows the creation of a related heuristic adapted to
different problems, as illustrated by the modifications of the gaze
heuristic above.
Table 1-1: Twelve Well-Studied Heuristics With Evidence of Use in the Adaptive Toolbox of Humans
Heuristic Definition Ecologically rational if: Surprising findings (examples)
Recognition heuristic If one of two alternatives is Recognition validity > .5 Less-is-more effect if α > β;
(Goldstein & recognized, infer that it has the systematic forgetting can be
Gigerenzer, 2002; higher value on the criterion. beneficial (chapter 6)
chapter 5)
Fluency heuristic If both alternatives are recognized Fluency validity > .5 Less-is-more effect; systematic
(Schooler & Hertwig, but one is recognized faster, forgetting can be beneficial
2005; chapter 6) infer that it has the higher value
on the criterion.
Take-the-best (Gigerenzer To infer which of two alternatives Cue validities vary, high Often predicts more accurately
& Goldstein, 1996; has the higher value: (a) search redundancy than multiple regression
chapter 2) through cues in order of validity; (Czerlinski, Gigerenzer, &
(b) stop search as soon as a cue Goldstein, 1999), neural
discriminates; (c) choose the networks, exemplar models, and
alternative this cue favors. decision tree algorithms
Tallying (unit-weight To estimate a criterion, do not Cue validities vary Often predicts as accurately as or
linear model; Dawes, estimate weights but simply little, low redundancy better than multiple regression
1979) count the number of positive (Hogarth & Karelaia, (Czerlinski et al., 1999)
cues. 2005a, 2006b)
Satisficing (Simon, Search through alternatives and Distributions of available Aspiration levels can lead to
1955a; Todd & Miller, choose the first one that exceeds options and other costs substantially better choice than
1999; chapter 18) your aspiration level. and benefits of search chance, even if they are arbitrary
are unknown (e.g., Bruss, 2000)
One-bounce rule (Hey, Continue searching (e.g., for prices) Improvements come in Taking search costs into
1982) as long as options improve; at the streaks consideration in this rule does
first downturn, stop search and not improve performance
take the previous best option.

(Continued )
Table 1-1: Twelve Well-Studied Heuristics With Evidence of Use in the Adaptive Toolbox of Humans
Heuristic Definition Ecologically rational if: Surprising findings (examples)
Gaze heuristic To catch a ball, fix your gaze on it, The ball is coming down Balls will be caught while
(Gigerenzer, 2007; start running, and adjust your from overhead running, possibly on a curved
McBeath, Shaffer, & running speed so that the angle path
Kaiser, 1995) of gaze remains constant.
1/N rule (DeMiguel, Allocate resources equally to each High unpredictability, Can outperform optimal asset
Garlappi, & Uppal, of N alternatives. small learning sample, allocation portfolios
2009) large N
Default heuristic If there is a default, follow it. Values of those who Explains why advertising has
(Johnson & Goldstein, set defaults match little effect on organ donor
2003; chapter 16) those of the decision registration; predicts behavior
maker; consequences when trait and preference
of a choice are hard to theories fail
foresee
Tit-for-tat (Axelrod, Cooperate first and then imitate The other players also Can lead to a higher payoff than
1984) your partner’s last behavior. play tit-for-tat “rational” strategies (e.g. by
backward induction)
Imitate the majority Determine the behavior followed Environment is stable or A driving force in bonding,
(Boyd & Richerson, by the majority of people in only changes slowly; group identification, and moral
2005) your group and imitate it. info search is costly or behavior
time consuming
Imitate the successful Determine the most successful Individual learning is A driving force in cultural
(Boyd & Richerson, person and imitate his or her slow; info search is evolution
2005) behavior. costly or time consuming

Note. For formal definitions and conditions concerning ecological rationality and surprising findings, see references indicated and related chapters
in this book.
 WHAT IS ECOLOGICAL RATIONALITY? 11

Evolved Capacities
Building blocks of heuristics are generally based on evolved cap-
acities. For instance, in the gaze heuristic, to keep the gaze angle
constant an organism needs the capacity to track an object visually
against a noisy background—something that no modern robot or
computer vision system can do as well as organisms (e.g., humans)
that have evolved to follow targets. When we use the term evolved
capacity, we refer to a product of nature and nurture—a capacity
that is prepared by the genes of a species but usually needs experi-
ence to be fully expressed. For instance, 3-month-old babies spon-
taneously practice holding their gaze on moving targets, such as
mobiles hanging over their crib. Evolved capacities are one reason
why simple heuristics can perform so well: They enable solutions
to complex problems that are fundamentally different from the
mathematically inspired ideal of humans and animals somehow
optimizing their choices. Other capacities underlying heuristic
building blocks include recognition memory, which the recogni-
tion heuristic and fluency heuristics exploit, and counting and
recall, which take-the-best and similar heuristics can use to esti-
mate cue orders.

The Adaptive Toolbox

We refer to the repertoire of heuristics, their building blocks, and
the evolved capacities they exploit as the mind’s adaptive toolbox
(Gigerenzer & Selten, 2001; Gigerenzer & Todd 1999). Table 1-1
lists a dozen heuristics that are likely in the adaptive toolbox of
humans, and in some other animal species, although the last couple
are rare even in primates and the evidence is controversial. The
content of the adaptive toolbox depends not only on the species,
but also on the individual and its particular stage of ontogenetic
development and the culture in which it lives.
The degree to which species share heuristics will depend on
whether they face the same adaptive problems, inhabit environ-
ments with similar structures, and share the evolved capacities on
which the heuristics are built. For instance, while the absence of
language production from the adaptive toolbox of other animals
means they cannot use name recognition to make inferences about
their world, some animal species can use other capacities, such as
taste and smell recognition, as input for the recognition heuristic.
A shared capacity between two species makes it more likely that
they will rely on similar heuristics, even if they have to solve differ-
ent problems, such as intercepting prey as opposed to fly balls. If
two species face the same adaptive problem but their evolved capac-
ities differ, this will lead to different heuristics. Consider estimation
12 THE RESEARCH AGENDA

of area. Humans can visually estimate area by combining height

and width dimensions. Some species of ants, instead, can produce
pheromone trails, leading to a very different area-estimation heu-
ristic based on this capacity: To judge the area of a candidate nest
cavity (typically a narrow crack in a rock), run around on an irregu-
lar path for a fixed period of time, laying down a pheromone trail;
then leave; then return to the cavity, move around on a different
irregular path, and estimate the cavity’s size by the inverse of the
frequency of reencountering the old trail. This heuristic is remark-
ably precise—nests that are half the area of others yield reencoun-
ter frequencies about 1.96 times greater (Mugford, Mallon, & Franks,
2001). Many such evolved rules of thumb in animals (including
humans) are amazingly simple and efficient (see the overview by
Hutchinson & Gigerenzer, 2005).

What Is Not a Heuristic?

Not all of the cognitive mechanisms that humans use, or devise for
use by artificial systems, are heuristics. Strategies such as the mean–
variance portfolio and the trajectory prediction approach described
above are not heuristics, because they attempt to weight and add
all available information and make use of heavy computation to
reach “optimal” decisions. The origins of such optimization theo-
ries can be traced back to the classical theory of rationality that
emerged during the Enlightenment. The birth year of this view has
been dated 1654, when the French mathematicians Blaise Pascal and
Pierre Fermat defined rational behavior as the maximization of the
expected value of alternative courses of action (Daston, 1988;
Gigerenzer et al., 1989). This vision of rationality goes hand in hand
with the notion that complex problems need to be solved by complex
algorithms and that more information is always better. A century later,
Benjamin Franklin described the ideal of weighting and adding all
reasons in a letter to his nephew (Franklin, 1779/1907 pp. 281-282):

April 8, 1779
If you doubt, set down all the Reasons, pro and con, in
opposite Columns on a Sheet of Paper, and when you have
considered them two or three Days, perform an Operation
similar to that in some questions of Algebra; observe what
Reasons or Motives in each Column are equal in weight, one
to one, one to two, two to three, or the like, and when you
have struck out from both Sides all the Equalities, you will see
in which column remains the Balance.… This kind of Moral
Algebra I have often practiced in important and dubious
Concerns, and tho’ it cannot be mathematically exact, I have
 WHAT IS ECOLOGICAL RATIONALITY? 13

found it extreamly [sic] useful. By the way, if you do not learn

it, I apprehend you will never be married.
I am ever your affectionate Uncle,
B. FRANKLIN

Modern versions of Franklin’s moral algebra include expected

utility maximization in economics, Bayesian inference theories in
the cognitive sciences, and various bookkeeping principles taught
in MBA courses and recommended by consulting firms. Markowitz’s
mean–variance optimization model and the calculation of a ball’s
trajectory are all variants of this form of calculative rationality.
Note that Franklin ends with the warning that learning his moral
algebra is necessary for marriage. We checked whether Franklin’s
admonition holds among a sample of economists who teach modern
versions of this optimizing view of rationality, asking them whether
they had chosen their partner using their favorite rational method.
Only one had. He explained that he had listed all the options he
had and all the important consequences that he could think of
for each woman, such as whether she would still be interesting to
talk to after the honeymoon excitement was over, would be good
at taking care of children, and would support him in his work
(cf. Darwin’s similar considerations—Gigerenzer & Todd, 1999). He
took several days to estimate the utilities of each of these conse-
quences and the probabilities for each woman that these conse-
quences would actually occur. Then he calculated the expected
utility for each candidate and proposed to the woman with the
highest value, without telling her how he had made his choice. She
accepted and they married. And now he is divorced.
The point of this story is emphatically not that Franklin’s
rational bookkeeping method is less successful in finding good
mates than simple heuristics, such as “try to get the woman that
your peers desire” (known as mate choice copying, which humans
and other animals follow—Place, Todd, Penke, & Asendorpf, 2010).
Rather, our point is that there is a discrepancy between theory and
practice: Despite the weight-and-add approach being advertised as
the rational method, even devoted proponents often instead rely on
heuristics in important decisions (Gigerenzer, 2007). Health is
another case in point. In a study, more than 100 male economists
were asked how they decided whether to have a prostate cancer
screening test (the PSA, or prostate specific antigen test—Berg,
Biele, & Gigerenzer, 2010). For this and other screening tests, virtually
all medical societies recommend that patients carefully weigh pros
and cons before deciding whether or not to have it; in this par-
ticular case, the benefit remains controversial (it is not proven that
screening saves lives) whereas its harms are clear (such as possible
 14 THE RESEARCH AGENDA

incontinence and impotence from operations following positive

tests). Yet two thirds of the economists interviewed said that they
had not weighed any pros and cons regarding this test but just did
whatever their doctors (or wives) said they should do. These cham-
pions of rationality were using the social heuristic “trust your
doctor” rather than the traditionally rational approach to make this
important decision. Again, theory and practice are at odds.
But which is right? We cannot say, without further investigation:
A heuristic is neither good nor bad per se, nor is a rational approach
such as Franklin’s bookkeeping method. Rather, the study of
ecological rationality informs us that we must ask a further all-
important question: In what environments does a given decision
strategy or heuristic perform better than other approaches? For
instance, in a world where doctors practice defensive decision
making because of fear of lawyers and malpractice trials (leading to
overtreatment and overmedication of patients) and where most
doctors do not have the time to read the relevant medical studies, it
pays to weigh pros and cons oneself rather than rely on the trust-
your-doctor heuristic (Gigerenzer, Gaissmaier, Kurz-Milcke,
Schwartz, & Woloshin, 2007).

What Is Ecological Rationality?

The concept of ecological rationality—of specific decision-making

tools fit to particular environments—is intimately linked to that
of the adaptive toolbox. Traditional theories of rationality that
instead assume one single universal decision mechanism do not
even ask when this universal tool works better or worse than any
other, because it is the only one thought to exist. Yet the empirical
evidence looks clear: Humans and other animals rely on multiple
cognitive tools. And cognition in an uncertain world would be
inferior, inflexible, and inefficient with a general-purpose optimiz-
ing calculator, for reasons described in the next section (see also
chapter 2).
We use the term ecological rationality both for a general vision of
rationality and a specific research program. As a general vision, it
provides an alternative to views of rationality that focus on internal
consistency, coherence, or logic and leave out the external environ-
ment. Ecological rationality is about the success of cognitive strate-
gies in the world, as measured by currencies such as the accuracy,
frugality, or speed of decisions. In our previous book, Simple
Heuristics That Make Us Smart, we introduced this term to flesh
out Herbert Simon’s adaptive view of rational behavior (Gigerenzer,
Todd, & the ABC Research Group, 1999). As Simon put it, “Human
rational behavior...is shaped by a scissors whose two blades are
 WHAT IS ECOLOGICAL RATIONALITY? 15

the structure of task environments and the computational capabili-

ties of the actor” (Simon, 1990, p. 7). We use the term logical ratio-
nality for theories that evaluate behavior against the laws of logic
or probability rather than success in the world, and that ask ques-
tions such as whether behavior is consistent, uses all information,
or corresponds to an optimization model. Logical rationality is
determined a priori—that is, what is good and bad is decided by
abstract principles—instead of by testing behavior in natural envi-
ronments. Shortly before his death, Simon assessed the ecological
rationality approach as a “revolution in cognitive science, striking
a great blow for sanity in the approach to human rationality”
(see Gigerenzer, 2004b), and Vernon Smith further promoted the
approach, using it in the title of his Nobel Laureate lecture (Smith,
2003). While it is being pursued by a growing number of such
leading researchers, the ecological approach is at present still a
small island compared to the wide empire of logical theories of
rationality.
As a research program, the study of ecological rationality inves-
tigates the fit between the two blades of Simon’s scissors. Fitting
well does not mean that the blades are mirror image reflections of
each other (cf. Shepard, 1994/2001; Todd & Gigerenzer, 2001)—in
manufacturing, the two blades of a good pair of scissors are made to
slightly twist or to curve with respect to one another so that they
touch at only two places: the joint and the spot along the blades
where the cutting is taking place. Furthermore, for cognition to be
successful, there is no need for a perfect mental image of the envi-
ronment—just as a useful mental model is not a veridical copy of
the world, but provides key abstractions while ignoring the rest. In
the finest scissors, the two blades that are made to fit each other are
coded with an identification mark to make sure that they are treated
as a pair. The study of ecological rationality is about finding out
which pairs of mental and environmental structures go together. As
we discuss in more detail in a section to come, it is based on envi-
ronment description, computer simulation, empirical test, and
analysis and proof, and it centers on three questions:

Given a heuristic, in what environments does it succeed?

Given an environment, what heuristics succeed?
How do heuristics and environments co-evolve to shape each
other?

The investment example answers the first and second questions,

which are intimately related. For instance, given the 1/N rule,
investment environments with many options—large N—and a
relatively small sample size of past data are the right match. Or
given an environment with N = 50 and 10 years of stock data, the
16 THE RESEARCH AGENDA

1/N rule is likely to perform better than the mean–variance port-

folio. Table 1-1 provides further such results, and so do the follow-
ing chapters. The third question addresses a larger issue, the
co-evolution of the adaptive toolbox and its environment. About
this, we know comparatively little—more research is needed to
study systematically the mutual adaptation of heuristics and envi-
ronments in ontogenetic or phylogenetic time (see chapter 18 for an
example).

The Structure of Environments

An environment is what an agent acts in and upon. The environ-
ment also influences the agent’s actions in multiple ways, by deter-
mining the goals that the agent aims to fulfill, shaping the tools
that the agent has for reaching those goals, and providing the
inputs processed by the agent to guide its decisions and behavior.
No thorough classification of environment structures exists at pres-
ent, but several important structures have been identified. Three of
these were revealed in the analysis of the investment problem
above: the degree of uncertainty, the number of alternatives, and
the size of the learning sample. Given their relevance for a wide
range of tasks, we consider them here in more detail.

Uncertainty The degree of uncertainty refers to how well the available

cues can predict a criterion. Uncertainty varies with the kind of cri-
terion and the prediction to be made. Next month’s performance of
stocks and funds is highly unpredictable, heart attacks are slightly
more predictable, and tomorrow’s weather is the most accurately
predictable among these three criteria. Furthermore, uncertainty is
higher when one has to make predictions about a different popula-
tion rather than just a different time period for the same population
(see chapter 2). Our investment example illustrates the important
principle that the greater the uncertainty, the greater can be the
advantage of simple heuristics over optimization methods, Bayesian
and otherwise.
There is an intuitive way to understand this result. In a world
without uncertainty, inhabited by gods and their secularized
version, Laplace’s demon, all relevant past information will aid
in predicting the future and so needs to be considered. In a fully
unpredictable world, such as a perfect roulette wheel, one can
ignore all information about the past performance of the wheel,
which is useless in saying what will come next. Most of the time,
though, humble humans live in the twilight of partial predictability
and partial uncertainty. In this challenging world, a principal way
to cope with the rampant uncertainty we face is to simplify, that is,
 WHAT IS ECOLOGICAL RATIONALITY? 17

to ignore much of the available information and use fast and frugal
heuristics. And yet this approach is often resisted: When a forecast-
ing model does not predict a criterion, such as the performance of
funds, as well as hoped, the gut reaction of many people, experts
and novices alike, is to do the opposite and call for more informa-
tion and more computation. The possibility that the solution may
lie in eliminating information and fancy computation is still
unimaginable for many and hard to digest even after it has been
demonstrated again and again (see chapter 3).

Number of Alternatives In general, problems with a large number of

alternatives pose difficulties for optimization methods. The term
alternatives can refer to individual objects (such as funds) or actions
(such as moves in a game). Even in many cases where there is an
optimal (best) sequence of moves, such as in chess, no computer or
mind can determine it, because the number of alternative action
sequences is too large and the problem is computationally intrac-
table. The computer chess program Deep Blue and human chess
masters (as well as Tetris players—see Michalewicz & Fogel, 2000)
have to rely instead on nonoptimizing techniques, including heu-
ristics. And people in more mundane everyday settings char-
acterized by an abundance of choices—such as when browsing
supermarket shelves or comparing phone service plans—are indeed
generally able to employ decision strategies to deal effectively
with numerous alternatives (Scheibehenne, Greifeneder, & Todd,
2010).

Sample Size In general, the smaller the sample size of available data
in the environment, the larger the advantage for simple heuristics.
One of the reasons is that complex statistical models have to esti-
mate their parameter values from past data, and if the sample size is
small, then the resulting error due to “variance” can exceed the error
due to “bias” in competing heuristics (see chapter 2). What consti-
tutes a small sample size depends on the degree of uncertainty, as
can be seen in the investment problem, where uncertainty is high:
In this case, a sample size of hundreds of years of stock data is
needed for the mean–variance portfolio to surpass the accuracy of
the 1/N rule.
There are many other important types of environment struc-
ture relevant for understanding ecological rationality. Two of
the major ones also considered in this book are redundancy and
variability.

Redundancy How highly correlated different cues are in the environ-

ment is an indication of that environment’s redundancy. This structure
18 THE RESEARCH AGENDA

can be exploited by heuristics such as take-the-best that rely on

the first good reason that allows a decision to be made and ignore
subsequent redundant cues (see chapters 8 and 9).

Variability The variability of importance of cues can be exploited by

several heuristics. For instance, when variability is high, heuristics
that rely on only the best cue perform better than when the vari-
ability is low (Hogarth & Karelaia, 2005a, 2006b; Martignon &
Hoffrage, 2002; see also chapter 13).
Note that our use of the term environment is not identical with
the physical or “objective” environment (Todd, 2001). For instance,
the first environment structure we discussed above, uncertainty,
comprises aspects of both the external environment (its inherent
unpredictability, or ontic uncertainty) and the mind’s limited under-
standing of that environment (epistemic uncertainty). Thus, the
degree of uncertainty is a property of the mind–environment system.
Similarly, the number of alternatives and the sample size depend
both on what is available in an environment and what an agent actu-
ally includes in its consideration set (such as the number N of funds
to be decided upon). Finally, redundancy and variability of cues
depend on what information is available in the physical environ-
ment, and also on what the decision makers actually perceive and
attend to, which can result in a more or less redundant and varying
set of cues to use. People in groups, for instance, tend to consider
redundant cues, but they could choose to explore further and dis-
cover more independent cues, and in this way partly create their
environment (see chapter 13). Thus, the environment considered in
ecological rationality is the subjective ecology of the organism that
emerges through the interaction of its mind, body, and sensory organs
with its physical environment (similar to von Uexküll’s, 1957, notion
of Umwelt).

Sources of Environment Structure

The patterns of information that decision mechanisms may (or may
not) be matched to can arise from a variety of environmental pro-
cesses, including physical, biological, social, and cultural sources.
Some of these patterns can be described in similar ways (e.g., in
terms of uncertainty or cue redundancy), but others are unique to
particular domains (e.g., the representation of medical informa-
tion). For humans and other social animals, the social and cultural
environment composed of other conspecifics can be just as impor-
tant as the physical or biological, and indeed all four interact
and overlap. For instance, an investment decision can be made
individually and purchased on the Internet without interacting
with anyone else, but the stock market itself is driven by both nature
 WHAT IS ECOLOGICAL RATIONALITY? 19

(e.g., a disastrous hurricane) and other people (e.g., the public reac-
tion to a disaster). Each of the heuristics in Table 1-1 can be applied
to social objects (e.g., whom to hire, to trust, to marry) as well
as to physical objects (e.g., what goods to buy). As an example, the
recognition heuristic (see chapters 5 and 6) exploits environment
structures in which lack of recognition is valuable information and
aids inferences about, say, what microbrew to order and where to
invest, but also whom to talk to and whom to trust (“don’t ride with
a stranger”). Similarly, a satisficing heuristic can be used to select a
pair of jeans but also choose a mate (Todd & Miller, 1999), and the
1/N rule can help investors to diversify but also guide parents in
allocating their time and resources equally to their children.
Environment structures are also deliberately created by institu-
tions to influence behavior. Sometimes this is felicitous, as when
governments figure out how to get citizens to donate organs by
default, or design traffic laws for intersection right-of-way in a hier-
archical manner that matches people’s one-reason decision mecha-
nisms (chapter 16). In other cases, institutions create environments
that do not fit well with people’s cognitive processes and instead
cloud minds, accidentally or deliberately. For instance, informa-
tion about medical treatments is often represented in ways that
make benefits appear huge and harms inconsequential (chapter 17),
casinos set up gambling environments with cues that make gam-
blers believe the chance of winning is greater than it really is
(chapter 16), and store displays and shopping websites are crowded
with long lists of features of numerous products that can confuse cus-
tomers with information overload (Fasolo, McClelland, & Todd, 2007).
But there are ways to fix such problematic designs and make new
ones that people can readily find their way through, as we will see.
Finally, environment structure can emerge without design
through the social interactions of multiple decision makers. For
instance, people choosing a city to move to are often attracted by
large, vibrant metropolises, so that the “big get bigger,” which can
result in a J-shaped (or power-law) distribution of city populations
(a few teeming burgs, a number of medium-sized ones, and numer-
ous smaller towns). Such an emergent distribution, which is
seen in many domains ranging from book sales to website visits,
can in turn be exploited by heuristics for choice or estimation
(chapter 15). Similarly, drivers seeking a parking space using a par-
ticular heuristic create a pattern of available spots that serves as the
environment for future drivers to search through with their own
strategies, which may or may not fit that environment structure
(chapter 18). In these cases, individuals are, through the effects
of their own choices, shaping the environment in which they
and others must make further choices, creating the possibility of a
co-adapting loop between mind and world.
 20 THE RESEARCH AGENDA

What We Already Know

To answer our questions about ecological rationality—when

and why different decision mechanisms in the mind’s adaptive
toolbox fit to different environment structures—we must build on a
growing foundation of knowledge about bounded rationality
and the use of heuristics. This was largely unknown territory in
1999 when we published Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart,
laying out the program on which the present book is based. Since
then, an increasing number of researchers have contributed to
the exploration of this territory, providing evidence that people rely
on heuristics in situations where it is ecologically rational and
demonstrating the power of appropriate heuristics in the wild,
including business, medical diagnosis, and the law. Here we briefly
review the progress made that supports the work reported in this
book.

What Is in the Adaptive Toolbox?

To study the ecological rationality of heuristics, we must first iden-
tify those being used. Table 1-1 provides an indication of the range
of heuristics that have been studied, but there are numerous others.
We know that many of the same heuristics are relied on by humans
and other animal species (Hutchinson & Gigerenzer, 2005). There is
now considerable evidence of the use of heuristics that make no
trade-offs between cues, such as take-the-best (chapter 9) and elim-
ination-by-aspects (Tversky, 1972). Recent studies have provided
further evidence for such so-called noncompensatory strategies in
consumer choice (Kohli & Jedidi, 2007; Yee, Hauser, Orlin, & Dahan,
2007). Related “one reason” decision heuristics have also been
proposed for another domain, choices between gambles, that has
traditionally been the realm of weighting-and-adding theories,
but the evidence for these mechanisms, such as the priority heuris-
tic (Brandstätter, Gigerenzer, & Hertwig, 2006; Katsikopoulos &
Gigerenzer, 2008), is under debate (e.g., Brandstätter, Gigerenzer, &
Hertwig, 2008; Johnson, Schulte-Mecklenbeck, & Willemsen, 2008).
Other recently investigated heuristics in the adaptive toolbox are
instead compensatory, combining more than one piece of informa-
tion while still ignoring much of what is available (e.g., tallying and
take-two—see chapters 3 and 10).
Among humans, an individual’s adaptive toolbox is not fixed—
its contents can grow as a consequence of development, individual
learning, and cultural experience. But little is known about how the
set of available tools changes over the life course, from birth to death
(Gigerenzer, 2003). Preliminary results suggest that age-related cog-
nitive decline leads to reliance on simpler strategies; nevertheless,
 WHAT IS ECOLOGICAL RATIONALITY? 21

young and old adults seem to be equally adapted decision makers

in how they adjust their use of heuristics as a function of environ-
ment structure (Mata, Schooler, & Rieskamp, 2007). This result
leads to the next issue.

How Are Heuristics Selected?

Ecologically rational behavior arises from the fit between the
current task environment and the particular decision mechanism
that is applied to it—so to study such behavior, we must also
know what heuristics an individual has selected to use. In their
seminal work on the adaptive decision maker, Payne, Bettman, and
Johnson (1993) provided evidence that people tend to select heuris-
tics in an adaptive way. This evidence focused on preferential
choice, where there is no objectively correct answer. Subsequently,
similar evidence was obtained for the ecologically rational use of
heuristics in inductive inference, where decision accuracy can be
assessed (e.g., Bröder, 2003; Dieckmann & Rieskamp, 2007; Pohl,
2006; Rieskamp & Hoffrage, 2008; Rieskamp & Otto, 2006). The
observation that people tend to rely on specific heuristics in appro-
priate situations where they perform well raised a new question:
How does the mind select heuristics from the adaptive toolbox?
This mostly unconscious process is only partly understood, but
three selection principles have been explored.

Memory Constrains Selection First, consider making a selection among the

top three heuristics in Table 1-1: the recognition heuristic, the flu-
ency heuristic, and take-the-best. Say we are betting on a tennis
match between Andy Roddick and Tommy Robredo. What strategy
can we use to select a winner before the start of the match? If
we have heard of Roddick but not of Robredo, then this available
information in memory restricts the strategy choice set to the recog-
nition heuristic alone (which in this case may well lead to a correct
prediction—the two contestants have played each other many times,
with Roddick usually winning); if we have heard of both players but
know nothing except their names, this restricts the choice to the flu-
ency heuristic (see chapter 6); and if we have heard of both and
know some additional facts about them, then we can choose between
the fluency heuristic and take-the-best. If neither player’s name is in
our memory, then none of these three heuristics applies. This does
not mean that we have to guess—we can check the current odds and
then imitate the majority, betting on the player whom most others
also favor (Table 1-1). Thus, the information available in the deci-
sion maker’s memory constrains the choice set of heuristics
(Marewski & Schooler, 2011), creating a first heuristic selection
principle.
22 THE RESEARCH AGENDA

Learning by Feedback The available information in memory limits what

heuristics can be used. But if there are still multiple alternative
heuristics to choose from, feedback from past experience can
guide their selection. Strategy selection theory (Rieskamp & Otto,
2006) provides a quantitative model that can be understood in
terms of reinforcement learning, where the unit of reinforcement
is not a behavior, but a heuristic. This model makes predictions
about the probability that a person selects one strategy within
a defined set of strategies (e.g., the set that remains after memory
constraints).

Ecological Rationality The third selection principle relies on the struc-

ture of the environment, as described by the study of ecological
rationality. For instance, the recognition heuristic is likely to lead
to accurate (and fast) judgments if the validity of recognition infor-
mation is high; that is, if a strong correlation between recognition
and the criterion exists, as is the case for professional tennis play-
ers and the probability that they will win a match. There is experi-
mental evidence that people tend to rely on this heuristic if the
recognition validity is high, but less so if it is low or at chance level
(see chapter 5). For instance, Pohl (2006) reported that 89% of par-
ticipants relied on the recognition heuristic in judgments of the
population of Swiss cities, where their recognition validity was
high, but only 54% in judgments of distance of those cities to the
center of Switzerland, where recognition validity was near chance.
Thus, the participants changed their reliance on the recognition
heuristic in an ecologically rational way when judging the same
cities, depending on the correlation between recognition and the
criterion.
This suggests that choosing to use the recognition heuristic
involves two processes: first, assessing recognition to see whether
the heuristic can be applied—the application of the memory con-
straints mentioned above; and second, evaluation to judge whether
it should be applied—the assessment of the ecological rationality
of the heuristic in the current situation. This is further supported
by fMRI results (Volz et al., 2006) indicating specific neural activity
corresponding to these two processes. Whether a similar combina-
tion of processes applies to the selection of other heuristics must
still be explored.

Are There Individual Differences in the Use of Heuristics?

If individuals all used the same heuristics when facing the
same situations, they would exhibit the same degree of ecological
 WHAT IS ECOLOGICAL RATIONALITY? 23

rationality. But while a majority typically rely on the same particu-

lar heuristic in experimental situations, others vary in the decision
mechanisms they employ, both between individuals and intra-
individually over time. Why would such individual variation exist?
Part of the answer lies in differences in experience that lead people
to have different strategies in their adaptive toolbox or to select
among the tools they have in different ways. But some researchers
have also sought personality traits and attitudes as the roots of these
differences in use of decision strategies that can lead some people
to be more rational (ecologically or logically) than others (e.g.,
Stanovich & West, 2000; see chapter 9).
Individual differences in heuristic use may not, however, indicate
differences in ecological rationality. There are at least two ecologi-
cally rational reasons for inter- and intra-individual strategy varia-
tion: exploratory behavior and flat performance maxima. Exploratory
behavior can be useful to learn about the choice alternatives and
cues available and their relative importance (or even about what
heuristics may be applicable in the current situation). It often takes
the form of trial-and-error learning and leads to individual differ-
ences and to what looks like intra-individual inconsistency in the
use of heuristics, but exploratory behavior can also often result in
better performance over the longer term. On the other hand, an envi-
ronment shows flat maxima when two or more heuristics lead to
roughly equal performance. In such a setting, different individuals
may settle on using one or another essentially equivalent strategy (or
even switch between them on different occasions) and show no dif-
ference in performance or hence, ecological rationality.
With sufficient appropriate experience, performance differences
can appear, coupled with differences in use of decision strategies.
In general, experts know where to look and tend to rely on limited
search more often than laypeople do (Camerer & Johnson, 1991).
This is illustrated by a study on burglary in which graduate stu-
dents were given pairs of residential properties described by eight
binary cues, such as apartment versus house, mailbox empty versus
stuffed with letters, and burglar alarm system present versus lack-
ing (Garcia-Retamero & Dhami, 2009). The students were asked
which property was more likely to be burgled. Two models of
cognitive processes were tested: weighting and adding of multi-
ple pieces of information and the take-the-best heuristic, which
bases its decision on only the most important discriminating
cue. The result was that 95% and 2.5% of the students were classi-
fied as relying on weighting-and-adding and take-the-best, respec-
tively. Normally, psychology experiments stop here. But the
authors then went on to study experts, in this case burglars from an
English prison who reported having committed burglary, on average,
24 THE RESEARCH AGENDA

57 times. The burglars’ decisions were based on different cognitive

processes; 85% of the men were classified as relying on take-the-
best and only 7.5% on weighting-and-adding. A second expert
group, police officers who had investigated residential burglaries,
showed the same predominance of take-the-best. The weighting-
and-adding process among students may largely reflect exploratory
behavior. These findings are consistent with other studies conclud-
ing that experts tend to rely on simple heuristics, often on only one
cue, whereas novices sometimes combine more of the available
information (Dhami, 2003; Dhami & Ayton, 2001; Ettenson,
Shanteau, & Krogstad, 1987; Shanteau, 1992).

Why Not Use a General-Purpose Optimizing Strategy Instead of an

Adaptive Toolbox?
Ecological rationality focuses on the fit between different decision
strategies applied by minds in different environmental circum-
stances. If there is only ever one decision mechanism to be applied,
then the question of ecological rationality does not even come up.
Thus, for those scientists who still yearn for Leibniz’s dream of a
universal calculus that could solve all problems or a single general-
purpose optimizing approach to make every decision, the fit
between the mind and the world is irrelevant. Logic, Bayesian sta-
tistics, and expected utility maximization are among the systems
that have been proposed as general-purpose problem-solving
machines. But they cannot do all that the mind can. Logic can solve
neither the investment problem nor the ball-catching task; Bayesian
statistics can solve the first but, as we have seen, not as well as a
simple heuristic, and the expected utility calculus has similar
limits. Still, why not strive for finding a better, more general opti-
mizing method?
In general, an optimization model works by defining a problem
in terms of a number of mathematically convenient assump-
tions that allow an optimal solution to be found and then proving
the existence of a strategy that optimizes the criterion of interest in
this simplified situation. For instance, the mean–variance portfolio
is an optimization model for the investment problem, given some
constraints. But it is important to remember, as the investment
case illustrates, that an optimization model for a tractable setting
does not imply optimal behavior in the unsimplified real world.
One of the main reasons why optimization methods can fall
behind simple heuristics in real-world applications is that they
often do not generalize well to new situations—that is, they are
not as robust as simpler mechanisms. In general, optimization
can only lead to optimal outcomes if it can estimate parameters
with no or minimal error, which requires environments with
 WHAT IS ECOLOGICAL RATIONALITY? 25

low uncertainty and large sample size, among other factors. We

deal extensively with this foundational issue of robustness and
why simple heuristics can lead to more accurate inferences than
sophisticated statistical methods in the next chapter, covering two
important types of uncertainty in prediction. The first is out-of-
sample prediction, where one knows a sample of events in a popu-
lation and has to make predictions about another sample from the
same population. This corresponds to the investment problem,
where the performance of funds up to some time is known, and
predictions are made about the performance in the next month,
assuming the market is stable. As we saw with the investment prob-
lem, simple heuristics like the 1/N rule that avoid parameter esti-
mation can be more robust than optimization methods in the face of
this kind of uncertainty. The second type of uncertainty appears in
out-of-population prediction, where one has information about a
particular population and then predicts outcomes for another pop-
ulation that differs in unknown ways. For instance, when a diag-
nostic system for predicting heart attacks is validated on a sample
of patients in Boston and then applied to patients in Michigan, it
confronts out-of-population uncertainty. Here again, robustness is
vital, and it can be achieved by radically simplifying the decision
mechanism, such as by replacing a logistic regression diagnostic
system with a fast and frugal tree for predicting heart disease
(see chapter 14). (A third type of uncertainty can also occur, related
to novelty and surprise. In this case, whole new choice alternatives
or consequences can appear—for instance, new prey species moving
into a territory due to climate change. To be prepared for such sur-
prises, coarse behavior that appears rigid and inflexible may be
superior to behavior fine-tuned and optimized to a past environment
that was assumed to be stable—see Bookstaber & Langsam, 1985.)
To summarize, despite the widespread use of optimization in
theory (as opposed to actual practice in business or medicine), there
are several good reasons not to rely routinely on this technique as a
strategy for understanding human behavior (Gigerenzer, 2004b;
Selten, 2001). In contrast, the study of the ecological rationality of
a heuristic is more general and does not require replacing the prob-
lem in question with a mathematically convenient small-world
problem (Savage, 1972) that can be optimized. Because it asks in
what environments particular heuristics perform well (and better
than other strategies), ecological rationality focuses on what is good
enough or better, not necessarily what is best.

Why Not Use More Complex Decision Strategies?

Although optimization is unrealistic as a general method for making
decisions, people and other animals could still use strategies that
26 THE RESEARCH AGENDA

are more complex than simple heuristics. Why should decision

makers ever rely on simple mechanisms that ignore information
and forego sophisticated processing? The classical justification is
that people save effort with heuristics, but at the cost of accuracy
(Payne et al., 1993; Shah & Oppenheimer, 2008). This interpreta-
tion of the reason for heuristics is known as the effort–accuracy
trade-off:

Humans and other animals rely on heuristics because infor-

mation search and computation cost time and effort; thus,
they trade off some loss in accuracy for faster and more frugal
cognition.

This view starts from the dictum that more is always better, as
described at the beginning of this chapter—more information and
computation would result in greater accuracy. But since in the real
world, so the argument goes, information is not free and computa-
tion takes time that could be spent on other things (Todd, 2001),
there is a point where the costs of further search exceed the
benefits. This assumed trade-off underlies optimization-under-
constraints theories of decision making, in which information
search in the external world (e.g., Stigler, 1961) or in memory (e.g.,
Anderson, 1990) is terminated when the expected costs exceed its
benefits. Similarly, the seminal analysis of the adaptive decision
maker (Payne et al., 1993) is built around the assumption that heu-
ristics achieve a beneficial trade-off between accuracy and effort,
where effort is a function of the amount of information and compu-
tation consumed. And indeed, as has been shown by Payne et al.’s
research and much since, heuristics can save effort.
The major discovery, however, is that saving effort does not nec-
essarily lead to a loss in accuracy. The trade-off is unnecessary.
Heuristics can be faster and more accurate than strategies that use
more information and more computation, including optimization
techniques. Our analysis of the ecological rationality of heuristics
goes beyond the incorrect universal assumption of effort–accuracy
trade-offs to ask empirically where less information and computa-
tion leads to more accurate judgments—that is, where less effortful
heuristics are more accurate than more costly methods.
These less-is-more effects have been popping up in a variety of
domains for years, but have been routinely ignored, as documented
in chapter 3. Now, though, a critical mass of instances is being
assembled, as shown throughout this book. For instance, in an age
in which companies maintain databases of their customers, com-
plete with historical purchase data, a key question becomes pre-
dicting which customers are likely to purchase again in a given
timeframe and which will be inactive. Wübben and Wangenheim
Discovering Diverse Content Through
Random Scribd Documents
had his own stock of stories picked up from his little Moslem friends, and
had you listened to him you would have recognized in a mutilated form the
doings of the old heroes of the "Nights"—the Chinese Magician, Aladdin,
The Three Calenders and the D'jin imprisoned by the seal of the great
"Zuleiman."

A tremendous friendship struck up between the légionnaire and the child,

and now, during all his leisure time at the barracks, Jacques busied himself
with an old knife and some small blocks of wood, picked up from who
knows where. The légionnaires are always making things, tobacco-boxes,
baskets, knife-handles, and what not, to sell for a few sous to spend on
drink or tobacco.

Jacques was making a wooden corporal and six légionnaires, excellent

reproductions of the original things, three inches high and each able to stand
on its own feet. They were in full marching uniform, blue overcoats turned
back to show the red trousers, knapsack and all.

They took two months in the making and a lot of trouble in obtaining the
paint for the coats and trousers, but they were finished for the time
appointed: Christmas Day.

Karasloff, who had seen the making of the things, was much moved
when he found that they were for Ivan, but he said scarcely anything. Ivan
did all the thanking, and the valiant wooden soldiers formed another bond,
if such a thing were wanted, between himself and the légionnaire.

One day Karasloff said to Jacques, "Life in the Legion is a healthy life;
though hard enough at times, the work is not without interest, one has the
sunshine and the blue sky and the good wine is only three sous a bottle. All
the same, this life in the Legion is killing me."

II
 Jacques looked at Karasloff in surprise. He had noticed lately that
Karasloff was growing thinner.

"Killing you!" said Jacques. "What ails you?"

The Slav smiled and shrugged his shoulders.

"I think it is this way with men," said he, "they do not bear transplanting.
The real soil in which the mind grows is the social condition to which it is
accustomed. Minds die when torn up by the roots from everything to which
they have been used to. Then there are some men whose bodies are affected
by their minds, and to whom mental decay means bodily decay—that is
how it is."

All this was Greek to Jacques.

"You will get all right," said he; "a turn with the Arabs will put new life
in you, and they say we are likely to be sent down south after them any
day."

But the expedition against the Arabs did not come off, and Karasloff did
not get all right; on the contrary the mysterious malady that had seized him
developed with alarming rapidity, it was acute phthisis; he was taken into
hospital, and one day Jacques, receiving an urgent message, went there to
find him dying.

Karasloff had sent for him to speak to him about Ivan. They had a long
talk, and after it Jacques returned to barracks looking troubled and
perplexed.

Karasloff died the next day and was buried on the day following in the
cemetery of the légionnaires with military honours.

It was decided between Jacques and El Kobir to say nothing to Ivan

about the death of his father.

"Life has trouble enough," said the old man. "He would gain nothing by
knowing—only grief; we will tell him that his father has gone on a journey.
I will keep him in my house and he will be to me as my own child, and you
can come to see him of an evening as usual."

Jacques, nothing loth, agreed, and things went on just as before with the
exception of Karasloff's absence from the evening meetings at the shop of
El Kobir.

The effect of the child on Jacques had been profound. This scamp, who
had started in life as an Apache and who had gone through the fire of the
Legion, so that one might have fancied his soul scorched for ever,
developed under the influence of the child quite unsuspected qualities and
possibilities.

The miraculous and sometimes appalling influence of mind upon mind,

and personality upon personality, was never more in evidence than in the
case of Ivan and Jacques.

You might have preached to Jacques; you might have beaten him,
tortured him, shown him visions or showered wisdom upon him without
producing any permanent effect upon his cynical bandit mind, not an evil
mind, but a mind set in narrow ways, with narrow and oblique outlooks
upon life.

Ivan touched the humanity in the man because Ivan was absolutely
human. I think children are the only real human beings, other people are
either men or women. However that may be, in the presence of Ivan
Jacques became something like Ivan, a very simple individual, not above
playing with wooden soldiers or converting himself into a horse for the
child to ride upon.

He would take him out sometimes on a Sunday—Sunday is a whole

holiday in the Legion—for walks on the ramparts, and the fact becoming
known among his companions, he told the whole story right out about
Karasloff, and as a result the regiment took an interest in the child.

Ivan made his appearance in the barrack-yard sometimes hand in hand

with his friend. It was wonderland to him. The drums and bugles, the
légionnaires saluting their officers, the sentinels with fixed bayonets, the
glare, the dust, the military atmosphere, all these things were for him
splendid beyond words, fascinating beyond a grown-up person's idea of
fascination. To be a légionnaire, what gifts could fortune hold out to mortal
greater than that?

Then these august beings joked with him and sometimes patted him on
the head, pulled out their bayonets from their scabbards and pretended to
stab him, taught him how to salute and nicknamed him the Corporal.

Then, one day, surrounded with jesting légionnaires, he and Beaujon, the
regimental tailor, had an interview, and Beaujon measured him as if for fun,
took the girth of his chest and the length of his legs and arms, and then—a
week later—Jacques appeared one evening at the shop of El Kobir with a
bundle. It was a little uniform for Ivan to be worn on festive occasions, a
complete corporal's uniform, képi and all.

Jacques for some time past had been out of sorts, with the manner of a
man who has something weighing upon his mind.

To-night he seemed more gloomy than ever, and when Ivan, after
showing himself in his new uniform, went off to have it changed, Jacques
turned to El Kobir.

"All the same," said he, "the child must go. The sight of him in that turn-
out has settled the business for me. Only yesterday, when Corporal Kempfer
asked him what he was going to be when he grew up, he said, 'A
légionnaire.'"

Jacques laughed bitterly, as though reviewing mentally the légion of lost

men to which he belonged, the regiment so glorious in the eyes of the child.
Ah! if Ivan could have seen his regiment of heroes with the eyes of
Jacques! and yet, who can say which were the clearer eyes, the eyes of the
child or the eyes of the man?

El Kobir put down his cigarette on the little ash-tray by his elbow, and
turned from the rug he was engaged in doctoring.

"Why must the child go?" said he.

 Jacques grumbled in his throat for a moment, then he burst out, "I don't
know what ails me or why I should make fantasie over the business. Do I
want to get rid of the child? I've got fond of that child. He's got sense in his
head, more sense than a battalion of numskull légionnaires. Now, when I
don't want to do a thing, nobody can make me do it. I don't speak of
regimental orders, but in ordinary things I say that when I don't want to do a
thing nobody can make me do it. I don't want to get rid of the child; why
then do I say he must go? I cannot tell you that.

"Now, listen! when Karasloff was dying, he said to me, 'I leave you Ivan
to send back to my people. He will take his own place among them when I
am dead. They do not know where he is. I took him away because he was
the only thing I cared for, you must return him to my people when I am
dead.' Karasloff has been dead five months," finished Jacques.

El Kobir was silent for a moment, then he spoke:

"But how are you to know where to send him?"

"Oh, mon Dieu, how? Karasloff gave me the address of his people just
before he died, and I promised to write to them."

"That was five months ago," said El Kobir.

"Yes, five months ago. I did not want to send the child off, and so I have
played false with Karasloff for five months."

"Not so," replied El Kobir, "you only delayed in performing a promise,

you did not break it."

"Oh, as for that," said Jacques, "I said to myself when he was dead that I
would keep the child, promise or no promise; then, lately it came to me that
a child has no say, he just has to take his marching orders, and I fell to
wondering if I was marching him into a ditch; just now when he came in
wearing that rig-out, it was as if the uniform hit me in the face. No, he has
to go back to his own people."
 Jacques knew the word "Duty" only as a military term. He could not tell
in the least what power it was that compelled him to do this thing he did not
want to do. The child had become a companion, an interest, almost a
necessity of life, and had you told him that it was the good influence of the
child upon him that was now driving the child away from him, he would not
have understood you.

No. The uniform had hit him in the face, that was enough for him.

El Kobir said nothing more. Like Jacques, he did not want to part with
the child, yet he was a just man. Had he been an unjust man or a hard-
hearted man, he would not have wanted to keep the child. Our good
qualities hit us very hard sometimes.

"And who are the child's people?" asked El Kobir, as Jacques, rose to go.

The latter took a paper from his pocket and handed it to his questioner,
who scanned it and handed it back without a word.

It was almost a world-known name that he had read, and it remained

before his eyes as he sat alone working on the rug.

He knew quite well that Jacques was about to write, or get his
commanding officer to write to the child's people, yet he had said nothing to
urge or deter him from that course.

He was an old man, and the child had grown round his heart. However,
Fate is Fate. If the thing had to be, it had to be. All the same, a half
welcome idea clung to his mind that Jacques might prove weak enough to
let the matter stand as it was for the present. A year or two, what did it
matter. And suppose the child were taken off to that splendid palace and that
glorious future awaiting him, might that prove the happiest fate for him?

El Kobir had a profound knowledge of the evil of wealth and the

weariness of greatness, and he looked on Western civilization with the
cynical eyes of an Eastern.
 Railway trains, telegraph lines, steamships, the magic that makes a voice
reach London from Paris, all these things did not impress him at all; viewed
against the background of the stately East they seemed like the vulgar
jewellery of a nouveau riche. He knew quite well that the glitter
surrounding a great man in Europe was only glitter, and that as far as
happiness was concerned, an Arab boy playing in the streets of Sidi-bel-
Abbès had, perhaps, a better chance of securing happiness than a princeling
in a palace of the West.

Still, the child was a European—and Fate was Fate.

Days passed and nothing happened. Jacques came of an evening as

usual, but not a word did he say on the all important topic, nor did the old
man speak of it.

He watched Jacques narrowly, but that personage showed nothing of his

mind or his intentions. He seemed a bit grimmer than usual, except when
Ivan was present, but one could argue nothing much from that. The
grimness might be simply the expression of dissatisfaction with himself for
having done nothing to further the orders of the dead Karasloff.

However, a week later the bomb-shell fell. Quite early in the afternoon
Jacques made his appearance at El Kobir's.

"They have come for the child," said he.

The old man, who was looking over some accounts, glanced up.

"Ah, they have come for the child. Where are they?"

"At the Hôtel d'Oran. They wanted to come here and fetch him. I told
them not. I told them I would fetch him myself. You see we don't want a
fuss—you had better say nothing to the child. I will just take him for a walk
and leave him with them at the hotel. They seem good folk these people of
his. There is a woman and a man, the grandfather and grandmother it seems.
There is also our Colonel at the hotel with all the papers about Karasloff.
 "The grandfather is M. le Prince, but he is all the same a kind-spoken old
man—the child will be happy enough. Besides, he need not know he is
going away for always. Only there must be no fuss. He does not want to
take any clothes with him or luggage—they will give him all that."

El Kobir called his servant to bring Ivan.

"Ivan," said El Kobir, "your friend has come to take you for a walk."

He took the child to his side for a moment and gave him a little squeeze,
then he kissed him on the forehead.

Ivan clapped his hand in that of Jacques, and the pair went off, while El
Kobir returned to his accounts.

But the addition of figures made little way, and the eternal cigarette was
unlit as he sat thinking, thinking, a hundred miles removed from the shop,
from his business, from himself.

He was an old man and he had lost many friends. His business was
indeed the only friend left to him. Jacques had never been his friend.

Just an acquaintance. They were people inhabiting different worlds, with

ideas, tastes, and natures absolutely dissimilar. Ivan by his magic had drawn
them together, but he had not united them.

Indeed, now that Ivan was gone, El Kobir felt a vague antagonism
towards Jacques.

Jacques had divided them. This rascal of a Jacques had done a fine thing
no doubt in parting with the child he was so fond of, for the child's sake—
all the same, he had taken the child away.

It was after dark and the swaying lamp was lit in the shop when Jacques
came back.

"Well," he said, "it's done, and they leave to-morrow for Oran. They
made me stay for a while and talk——"
 "And the child?" asked El Kobir.

"The child's as pleased as they are. He ran into the old woman's arms
directly they met, and called her grandmama. He does not know he's going
away for good—anyway, there he is quite happy. Happier than I've ever
seen him."

El Kobir heaved a sigh. Then he went off into the back premises and
returned with a bundle. It was the uniform of the Corporal of the
légionnaires, little képi and all.

"These are yours," said he, "you had better take them back to the man
who made them. Your Legion is a légionnaire the less now."

Jacques unrolled the things, looked at the blue coat and red trousers, the
sash and the belt, then as we close the pages of a story, he folded them
together, put them under his arm, and with the képi swinging by the chin-
strap to his finger, bade good-night to the old man and went off to the
barracks.

MANSOOR

They were coming back from the rifle butts in the blaze of the late
afternoon sun, Jacques walking beside Corporal Kandorff. The roofs and
minarets of Sidi-bel-Abbès showed beyond the barracks, swimming in the
heat-shaken air, whilst on the tepid wind blowing in their faces came the
scents of the desert and the smell of the town.

You can smell Sidi-bel-Abbès half a league off, the perfume of the
yellow city is as distinctive as the perfume of a marigold, and as
unforgettable. Camels, negroes, jasmine flowers, caporal tobacco and the
old, old yellow earth of the ramparts all lend a trace of themselves to form a
scent the very recollection of which brings up the bugles of the Legion, the
domes of the city, and the cry of the muezzins from the minarets of the
mosques.

Jacques was thirsty, and as he tramped along beside Kandorff he was

abusive towards the universe in general. When he was short of money he
was always like that, and lately he had been very short of money, reduced to
borrowing a few halfpence that morning from Kandorff—fifteen centimes,
and they were spent.

"Seven years in the regiment," he was saying, "and look at me. I who
know every hole and corner of Sidi-bel-Abbès. Things are going from bad
to worse; a year ago there was lots of pickings to be had what between the
new drafts from Oran and the town there; but of late there's not a man
joined the Legion with more than the rags he stands up in, and as for the
town it's gone rotten. Visitors don't seem to come there now, there's no
money and no tick and no trade to be done. I was the sharpest man in the
regiment once at carving a bit out of the Arabs and the visitors and the
traders, but where's the use in being sharp when you have nothing to cut.
Tell me that. I had money once, enough to start in business when I got my
discharge; much good my discharge will do me when I get it. It will mean
rejoining for another five years, and that will be the end of me. I want the
sight of money and I want it bad; every time I pass the Crédit Lyonnais I
can scent the gold there just as you smell the cooking going on in a café. I'll
break in there some day, and if I can't do anything more I'll just roll in the
twenty-franc pieces, swallow them, choke myself with them. That's how I
feel—you'll see."

"Then they would shoot you," said Kandorff, "and I would never get my
fifteen centimes back."

Jacques laughed.

"Well, there would be some satisfaction in that," said he. "It's better to
die owing fifteen centimes than owing nothing—one has someone to mourn
one then. Ah, ha! here's the placard for Mansoor stuck up."

They had reached the barrack gates and he pointed to a poster just stuck
upon the right gate-post. It was the offer of a reward of five hundred francs
for the capture of Mansoor, late superintendent of the Arab police, and the
delivery of his body alive or dead into the hands of Colonel Tirard, chief of
the regiment of légionnaires stationed at Sidi-bel-Abbès. The poster was
issued from the Bureau Arabe, but the goods were to be delivered at the
headquarters of the Legion.

Mansoor, two days ago, had murdered a légionnaire; it was a sordid and
ferocious crime, committed on account of a woman. The criminal had made
his escape, Sidi-bel-Abbès had been searched, Oran sealed, and the desert
posts warned, but the murderer was still at large, hence the reward. Jacques
and Kandorff stood amongst the crowd that had gathered to discuss the
notice.

"They'll never get him," said Kandorff.

"And why not?" asked one of the crowd.

"Why not? Well, just for the very good reason that he is an Arab and the
Arab police will shelter him and wink at his escape."

"Winking at him won't help him much if he wants to cross the frontier,"
replied the other, "to get into Tunisia."

"He won't bother about that," said Kandorff; "he'll stick on to some
wandering tribe and most likely the next time we meet him he'll be fighting
us down south somewhere. That is the sort of man worse to let loose than a
plague, and he will very likely raise a holy war of his own if he is not
caught."

Kandorff—whose name was not Kandorff and who had spent some years
in the Asiatic Department of the Russian Foreign Office—was a man who
knew what he was talking about. He turned and entered the barrack yard
with Jacques and the business passed from their minds. A légionnaire has no
time to bother about murders, even if the murdered man is a légionnaire.
Jacques and his companion had not even time to think about resting. They
had their washing to do.
 Jacques had annexed a piece of soap that morning and hidden it under
his bed; he shared it now with Kandorff as they stood at the great washing
trough, and then, the uniforms washed, pressed and packed safely away,
they started off on their usual evening's walk to the town.

Arrived there they parted company, Kandorff going on some business of

his own, whilst Jacques, left to himself, strolled off down one of the
boulevards. The evening was delightful after the heat of the day, and the
wind from the desert, warm but stimulating, played with the leaves of the
trees bordering the street and blew in the face of the légionnaire as he
walked, glancing in at the shop windows and pausing here and there to
inspect their contents.

He reached the Crédit Lyonnais, which was closed, and stood for a
moment looking at the building as though measuring the strength of it. This
was the place where fellows shovelled twenty-franc pieces across the
counter with copper shovels and pulled out drawers stuffed with pink and
blue five-hundred-franc notes. Dreams rose before him of what the Legion
could do if it only had the courage of its desires and opinions. The looting
of Sidi-bel-Abbès rose up before him, a gaudy picture with himself in the
foreground armed with a copper shovel and a sack. Then he resumed his
way, striking from the boulevard into the native quarter, or rather the
Moslem quarter of the town.

He was quite at home here and well known to many of the traders. He
had eaten kouss-kouss in the terrible little native cafés where the front
premises are only the stage curtains that conceal an opium joint or worse;
he was known to black-eyed Arab children and to the quick-eyed Arab
police, and to-night, being hard up for cigarettes, he was on the look-out for
someone amidst all this host of acquaintances who could supply him.

In a narrow street and before an open booth he paused. Here on a bench

beneath a swinging lamp sat a yellow man, cross-legged and wearing a red
fez. He was rolling cigarettes.

He had rolled cigarettes since the time when he was a little boy, son of a
cigarette-maker in Blidah. He would continue rolling cigarettes till they
took him to the grave. He did not know how many he had rolled since his
fingers had first closed on the rice paper and the yellow opium-tinctured
tobacco. He might have rolled millions, tens of millions, he did not know.
He never smoked the things he rolled and one might have taken him for an
automaton, but for the song that was always humming upon his lips, a song
without words, monotonous, dreary and fateful.

Jacques paused before this image and greeted it. It nodded in reply to his
greeting and went on with its work.

Jahāl, for that was the name of this man, did not work for his own hand.
He was only a servant in the employ of the Kassim company. It supplied
him with the tobacco and cigarette-papers and paid him for the finished
product. He sat now without replying to the remarks of the légionnaire, for
he guessed Jacques was hard up for a smoke and had come to borrow.

Jacques noted the sullenness of the other and resented it. He was just on
the point of flinging an epigram at the head of the silent one and turning on
his heel, when the reed curtain at the back of the shop parted, revealing the
head of Mansoor the murderer.

There was no mistaking that dark haughty head with the hare lip that
exposed glistening teeth in an eternal sneer.

The pause in the talk between Jacques and Jahāl had evidently inspired
Mansoor with the belief that the visitor was gone, and, as evidently, he had
something urgent to say to Jahāl, else he would not have put forth from his
hiding hole. As it was he drew back instantly, but not before Jacques had
sprung into the shop, upsetting Jahāl, sending the pile of made cigarettes
flying every way and striking with his head the swinging lamp so that it
smashed against the fretwork screen depending from the low ceiling and
went out.

Next moment, Jacques was behind the screen, in darkness, struggling

with a cloth which someone—he knew it was a woman from the clash of
the bangles on the arms—had flung over him. Then he was free and
bursting out of a stifling atmosphere of camel-hair cloth, scent, and native
smell through a window and with his right hand on the shoulder of
Mansoor.
 Mansoor had sprung into a lane through a window. The moon, filling
with light as the west sank to darkness, shone on the scene and showed now
the flying figure of Mansoor and the following figure of Jacques, who had
missed the shoulder hold, fallen face forward from the low window on to
the pavement, and, nothing daunted by his fall, was in full pursuit.

Jacques had joined in many a game of life and death, but never one quite
like this. There was money in this business, a lot of money, and fame. More
fame than he could ever get were he to perform the utmost prodigies of
valour as a soldier fighting the enemy with his regiment.

Then Mansoor was a devil incarnate and he was absolutely certain to be

armed. He had not fired yet, nor would he do so as long as there was the
faintest chance of escape without using the automatic pistol in his belt.

He, Jacques, was unarmed.

All these considerations, flashing and splashing like heliograph signals

across the brain of Jacques, tinged the business with the charm of
drunkenness. This was Life stirred up and sublimated, the sort of life one
holds for a moment by virtue of Absinthe.

With the rush of a rat, Mansoor broke from the lane into a passage that
was simply a crack between two houses that were built right against the
inner wall of the ramparts.

The house next the rampart had an iron stair leading to the upper story
and the roof. Mansoor, followed by Jacques, swarmed up these stairs,
reached the roof, reached the ramparts and dropped over into the encircling
ditch.

Mansoor made the drop fifteen seconds only before Jacques. It was
thirty feet and they ought both to have been killed, but we may fancy that
the gods like a bit of sport sometimes, for they weren't.

But the Arab recovered from the shake-up of the fall before his pursuer
had done likewise, and from the start at the ditch's edge for the race for
freedom Jacques was under a half-minute handicap.
 Half a minute is a terribly long time when the energy of life is blazing to
a point as in battle, or a pursuit like this. It gave Mansoor time to get well
away.

Just here, around the walls of Sidi-bel-Abbès, you will find vineyards
stretching southward and breaking up at last into market gardens. Mansoor
was making his way between two vineyards down a path that ended in a
cul-de-sac.

A fence, in fact, ended the path and barred his way and checked it for a
moment. He left it broken behind him and struck across a market garden
where long lines of bell glasses glowed in the light of the moon. In the
grape season all this place would be watched by the grape growers and by
this a hue and cry might have been set up and half a dozen unsolicited
helpers spoiling Jacques' game, but at this time of year the place was
deserted and the pursued and the pursuer had the ground to themselves.

The time taken by Mansoor in breaking through the fence gave Jacques
an advantage, for the break was so thorough that he was able to get through
without delay; when he was through, Mansoor, at the other end of the
garden, was negotiating the fence on that side.

Beyond lay broken ground, spotted here and there with stunted bushes
and cacti.

When Jacques reached this place, Mansoor was far ahead but distinctly
visible, and he had altered his pace. He was no longer running as if for his
life, he had settled down to a jog-trot, and Jacques, after a spurt that
lessened the distance between them by a quarter, held himself in and settled
down to the pace of Mansoor.

The man who holds the lead in an affair of this kind holds the advantage,
for the pursuer, if he overhauls the pursued, must inevitably come up to the
scratch winded.

Jacques had come to the conclusion that the murderer was unarmed, else
here, in this desolate place, he would undoubtedly have attacked instead of
running away. Believing this, he determined to hang on the other's heels,
wear him down, and then close with him.

He knew his own powers; a born long-distance runner and trained to

feats of almost fabulous endurance by his seven years' life in the Legion, he
felt that he held the trump card, and if, as he felt certain now, Mansoor was
unarmed, he had no fear of the issue.

Sidi-bel-Abbès is situated on the borders of the desert, but the Algerian

desert must not be confused with the Sahara, in those places where it shows
limitless wastes of sand.

The desert places of Algeria show little sand except in districts away
down south, as, for instance, by the Oasis of the Five Palms or that great,
sandy track where we saw the Legion fronting the Arabs and defeating
them.

The desert of Algeria consists of waste land, rock-strewn and desolate,

yellow earth, sun-baked and hardened, a few miserable scrub bushes and
cacti, an occasional oasis with palm trees blowing in the desert wind.

There is no water, except that which flows underground and breaks to

the surface here and there to form the oasis pools.

Through this wilderness runs the great southern military road, built by
the soldiers of the Legion, and the line Mansoor was now taking lay to the
west of this road. It was his object to avoid the road; in this Jacques was
with him; the road meant military patrols and the prize taken out of Jacques'
hands.

Five hundred francs! Never for a moment had the idea left his mind; it
had driven him like a charging bull into the shop of the cigarette-maker, it
led him in pursuit down the lane, over the rampart, into the ditch and
through the market garden; it was leading him now on the most desperate
and dangerous chase that man ever engaged in, and it would lead him to the
end, whatever the end might be.
 The serious fact for Mansoor at that moment lay, not in the fact that he
was a murderer, but the fact that he was five hundred francs. He was
bundles of Algerian cigarettes, bottles of blue Algerian wine, jolly evenings
at the canteen, lots of soap to wash uniforms with, kisses from black-eyed
girls, glasses of coloured liqueurs at Kito's—and he was being chased by
Jacques!—heaven help him!

The half-moon blazing in the sky lit the chase, and the cold of the
Algerian night checked the breath of Jacques.

It seemed also to affect Mansoor, for all of a sudden he slackened his

pace from a jog-trot to a quick walk.

His pursuer did the same, nothing loth.

At this pace, the marching pace of the Legion, he could keep on all night
and half the next day.

In the Legion on a route march he would be carrying rifle, three hundred

rounds of ammunition, knapsack and tent-pole, a weight of fifty
kilogrammes or so. To-night he was free of all this, his own man.

As he kept up the pursuit the thought suddenly occurred to him that the
barracks would have long closed by this, and not answering to the roll call
his name would be posted as a deserter. This thought amused him for a
moment, then it troubled him. He had deserted from the regiment before;
that always leaves a stain on a man's name, no matter how good his
subsequent conduct may be. The punishment for a second attempt is very
heavy and the Legion is deaf to excuses and very merciless. Stung by this,
he determined to finish the business at once, if possible, close with his prey
and chance it. He broke into a run, but, lo and behold, as though gifted with
eyes in the back of his head, or a supernatural sense of hearing, Mansoor
did likewise.

Five minutes later, both men, as if by tacit consent, had fallen back into
the old pace.
 There are occasions when men hold quite long conversations with one
another without a word of speech, and whilst they are grasping for one
another's throats. Mansoor was saying to Jacques, "If you increase your
pace I will increase mine; there is nothing to be gained by you in
overhauling me like that; quite the reverse, for, seeing that I have a long
lead, you would be the most exhausted of the two if you managed to
outstrip me. Besides, in a racing test you might not be able to do so."

Jacques was saying, "That is true—curse you!—well, then, let's heel and
toe it, I have the advantage of the practice marches of the Legion on my
side, and I can stick to you till we both drop. I know, you have method in
your game, for the further you lead me the more chance you have of falling
in with some tribe of wandering Arabs who would back you against me.
Well, I must take the chance."

These two men had once known each other; at a distance, it is true, still
they had known one another and exchanged greetings. Jacques had a
reputation of his own in Sidi-bel-Abbès, and so had Mansoor. They knew
one another's reputations. This knowledge helped in the mute conversation
between the pursued and the pursuer.

At dawn they had put some thirty kilometres between them and Sidi-bel-
Abbès; the outline of the Tessala Mountains hardened against the fading
darkness and then the sun rose, a ball of guinea-gold coloured, eye-dazzling
fire, in a blue, still, silent sky.

The solitude here was unbroken by any sign of life; grass patch, scrub
bush, ash-grey-green cactus, all seemed petrified in their natural colours,
unreal in the real and living sunlight. Forsaken, and given over to eternal
silence.

Jacques, used as he was to extreme and violent exercise, was beginning

to fail. On route marches, it is true, he had often done forty kilometres
heavily laden. They were not yet forty kilometres from their starting-point,
and he was carrying nothing, but it must be remembered that the Legion on
the march pauses often for a rest and that five minutes' rest makes all the
difference.
 Jacques had not had a moment's rest. The same held true for Mansoor.
Both men were exhausted, but they were exhibiting the effects of their
exhaustion in different ways. Jacques, marching well and firmly, had the
appearance of a man still capable of covering many miles. His legs were
still all right, but his head was giving out. The higher nervous centres could
not hold to their work much longer, and that is one of the most fatal forms
of exhaustion. For half a minute at a time he would forget Mansoor. At any
moment he might fall together like a house of cards and lie on the ground,
not dead, but sleeping peacefully, a prey to the man he was pursuing.

On the other hand, Mansoor was failing in the legs; occasionally he

swayed and stumbled, but his mind was clear and it dominated his body, as
a jockey dominates an exhausted horse.

They had entered a little gully where years ago quarrying work had gone
on, for stone to metal the great south road, and Jacques' mind had just
returned from one of its momentary lapses, when he saw the man he was
pursuing wheel round and advance towards him.

Mansoor was holding something in his right hand. It was an automatic

pistol.

It was the sight of the pistol that brought Jacques' mind vividly awake. A
pistol! And he had been absolutely certain that his enemy was unarmed. The
fact remained, and before the fact Jacques turned tail. But he did not run.

On his left a cave-opening in the rock caught his eye, and urged by the
dread of a bullet in his back he dived into the cave.

Mansoor, pistol in hand, came along, swaying as he came, wild-eyed and

dreadful, with the grey pallor of exhaustion showing through his dusky
skin.

Right opposite the cave mouth, and thirty feet or so away, he flung
himself down on the ground, rested his left arm on a piece of rock and the
barrel of the pistol on the angle of his elbow, taking aim straight into the
cave.
 Jacques, seeing this, flung himself flat on the cave floor and waited for
the first shot.

But Mansoor did not fire. He seemed content to lie recovering from his
exhaustion and holding his enemy at bay.

Jacques had retreated as far as possible into the darkness of the cave, the
opening was some nine feet or so from his face, and as he lay on his
stomach, his chin resting on his arm, the fact that he was cornered and at the
mercy of the other appeared before him in all its bleak simplicity.

Mansoor, when he had rested sufficiently and gauged the possibilities of

the situation, would come straight to the cave mouth and then all would be
over with Jacques.

But the man with the pistol showed no signs of such an intention yet, he
seemed content to wait and watch, keeping a strict blockade till his energy
and resolution found themselves again.

Jacques wondered what it would be like when he was dead and lying
there always in the cave. Mansoor would not bother to bury him. He
thought of what his companions in the Legion would say and think. They
would fancy that he had deserted and had succeeded in making his escape.
Then appeared before him the blue sea at Oran and Oran itself, with the
barracks away up on the heights just as he had seen it on the first day of his
arrival in Algeria, more than seven years ago. Then the sea, from a thought,
became a vision and shimmered up to him and over him. Mansoor
vanished, the cave, the sunlight at its door and the fact that he was held for
Death.

Jacques had fallen asleep.

Had you fired a cannon in the ravine he would not have heard it. It was
the sleep that follows on high excitement or profound exhaustion.

He was awakened by the bugles of the Legion sounding the réveillé, so it

seemed to him for a moment, then the bugles of the Legion became the
crying of birds.
 Birds were flocking about the ravine, great birds whose shadows swept
the ground in front of the cave. With the return of consciousness to Jacques
came the return of full mental energy. He remembered everything, and
recognized to his astonishment that it was evening, towards sundown, and
that Mansoor was still in exactly the same position, his face half sheltered
by his arm, taking aim.

Yet it was morning when Jacques had fallen asleep. All the burning day
the murderer must have lain like this, watching—or had sleep taken him
too?

Suddenly one of the great birds whose shadows had been flitting across
the ground swept down and lighted on the head of Mansoor. It stood there
for a second, fiery-eyed and swaying, like a funeral plume, then, shooting
its head forward and downward, it peeped up into the face of the watching
one and plucked out an eye.

The birds of the desert always attack the eyes of a man first. The vultures
will haul at a fallen man's head till they get the face sideways. Jacques, who
knew all about the birds of the desert and their ways, gave a shout; next
moment he was kneeling beside the dead man.

Mansoor had been dead for hours, death had struck him most likely the
moment he had changed the upright for the recumbent position, giving him
only just time to lie down and take aim. His heart had given out owing to
his exertions and the excitement of the chase, or a blood vessel had broken
in his brain.

Jacques took the pistol from the dead hand, not without a struggle. Then
he saw why the pursued man had not fired on him. The magazine was
empty.

Mansoor must have been unable to obtain ammunition after the murder.
He had used bluff. It is almost as good sometimes.

The birds had now drawn off. They could be seen perched here and there
on the rocks and waddling on the ground. Jacques shook his fist at them.
Then, taking a clasp knife out of his pocket, a knife as keen as a razor, he
did that unto the body of Mansoor which would ensure the reward of five
hundred francs.

As he stood up the sun was setting, and the half-moon, like a ghost in the
east, was strengthening in outline. From that eastern sky, warm blue and
infinite in depth, a gentle wind was blowing, shaking the leaves of the few
stunted plants that grew in the ravine.

Jacques, having finished his business, came out of the ravine and stood
shading his eyes with his hands.

The land far and wide lay glowing in the sunset light, all hardness had
vanished from it, and the desolation was almost masked by the colours that
spread the distance.

The légionnaire was looking now to the east. He had determined to make
for the great south road and strike along it back to Sidi-bel-Abbès. He was
stiff and so exhausted from want of food that he could take little pleasure in
his triumph and the prospect of the reward.

His one idea was rest and food and drink. As he tramped along, making
due east, he found by good chance one of those tiny oases which occur here
and there in this part of the Algerian desert. Here, by a well scarcely bigger
than a slop basin, grew a prickly pear bush with ripe fruit on it. He drank
from the well and cut some of the pears, taking care to avoid the prickles,
then, having smoked a pipe, he started again by the light of the moon,
which was now burning white and clear.

By the well he had heard the far-off crying and quarrelling of the birds
from the ravine; he could hear it still as he walked, the sound growing ever
fainter, till it ceased altogether before he struck the road just at the
milestone that marked the forty-first kilometre from Sidi-bel-Abbès.

Here he was lucky enough to fall in with a cart going in the direction of
the town, and obtained a lift to the rest-house, which lay five miles ahead
and where for a couple of francs, which he had taken from the pocket of
Mansoor, he obtained a bed for the night and some food.
 At four o'clock the next afternoon, Jacques, in the highest of spirits,
dusty and tired, yet stepping out vigorously, saw the roofs and mosque
minarets of Sidi-bel-Abbès breaking up before him against the sky.

He was going to enter that town as a conqueror. He gloated over the

idea. What a good joke! His name by this had without doubt been posted as
the name of a deserter, the Legion would be speculating on his escape, they
would see him returning, jeer over the fact—and then!

Besides, what a smack it would be at the Arab police. The police and the
légionnaires are not friends. The police have the power to arrest an escaped
légionnaire, and more than that, they receive a reward for his capture. You
can fancy, then, how sharp they were on the look-out for prey of this sort,
and the ill-feeling that results.

Jacques, trudging along, had quite forgotten the police, also the fact that
he had no doubt been posted as a deserter by this. All of a sudden the sound
of horse-hoofs on the road behind him made him turn his head. Two
horsemen were approaching at full speed. They had been scouting amongst
the broken ground on the eastern side of the road, and the dusty figure of
the légionnaire tramping along had attracted their attention.

They overhauled him, recognized him at once as the man for whom a
reward was out, and whilst one of them held him under the muzzle of a
pistol, the other clapped a handcuff on his right wrist. The handcuff was
attached to a couple of fathoms of thin steel chain, and next moment they
were mounted and trotting for Sidi-bel-Abbès, Jacques running behind them
in the dust of the road.

A nice triumphal entry for a corporal of the Legion.

They passed the gates, and then down the main boulevard they came, the
infernal police, like boys returning from fishing, only too proud to exhibit
their catch.

They were bringing him through the town on purpose. He knew it, but he
did not care. He was promising himself a fine revenge, and the onlookers in
the street were treated to a new sight, an escaped légionnaire being brought
in bursting with laughter and shouting ribald remarks to his captors.

At the barracks the police dismounted, and leaving their horses in charge
of one of the légionnaires on duty, they marched their still laughing prisoner
off to the guard-room, Five minutes later they were standing before Colonel
Tirard, waiting for their reward, Jacques between them.

The Colonel was in a temper. Jacques was one of the best men in the
regiment, and one of the best marchers. He had been well treated. Desertion
on the part of a man like that was a big crime in his eyes.

"So, you scamp," said he, "they've brought you back. A nice thing truly,
for you, a man in authority over others. Well, I will teach you—what's in
that bundle tied to your belt?"

"A present for you, mon Colonel," replied Jacques.

He took the bundle, which consisted of something wrapped up in the

dead man's shirt, placed it on the table, opened it, and exposed the grinning
head of Mansoor.

"There are things that explain themselves," said Jacques that night, as he
told the story of his interview with Colonel Tirard to his companions.

He spent the money in diverse ways, but he bought no cigarettes. Jahāl

supplied him with cigarettes gratis during the next three months. He had
said nothing about Jahāl's part in the business of hiding Mansoor, and he
managed to impress Jahāl with the importance of his silence and its
commercial value. That was Jacques all over.

THE BIRD CAGE

I
 Jacques was a bird fancier.

The slums of London and Paris seem to breed bird fanciers, men who
supply the trade, and just amateurs, market porters, artisans and so forth,
who go bird-catching outside the city limits of a Sunday, or who content
themselves with buying the feathered article in the rough state and training
it for profit.

Jacques in his Paris days used to do this occasionally by way of an

honest occupation, and now, in Algeria, a corporal in the second regiment of
the Foreign Legion, he managed to turn an honest penny sometimes at the
bird-fancying business. A Spanish Jew with an unpronounceable name was
his partner, Arab boys did the trapping, and Jacques found many a customer
for the little red, soft-throated African birds amongst the officers of the
Legion and their friends.

It was in this way I met him first.

One Sunday I came across him on the ramparts of Sidi-bel-Abbès.

He had come there to meet someone in connection with the bird

business, and as the someone had not yet turned up, we sat and talked. He
told me this story, or, at least, he gave me the substance of the story I am
going to tell you.

The Legion recruits its units mostly from the failures and broken-down
men of the world; consequently, and leaving aside young criminals who are
driven into it by the law, it numbers few very young men in its ranks.

Raboustel formed an exception to this rule.

He was quite young, not more than eighteen or so, a fine fellow in every
way, but unfit for the life he had chosen. He was a rebel, at least against
discipline and restraint.

He had joined the Legion expecting, no doubt, an adventurous life

hunting down Arabs or fighting pitched battles with the tribes; he did not
enjoy the reality, eternal drill, with road-making, route-marching, and odd
jobs as the only alternatives.

However, he possessed considerable force of character and power of

restraint over himself, and after the first month or so settled down—or
seemed to.

He had no special chum, but he was popular in his way and friendly with
Jacques. He told the latter his history—how he had been brought up to do as
he liked by a mother who doted on him, how his mother had died, and his
father, a vine-grower near Avignon, had tried to make him work; how he
had rebelled, not against work, but against the monotony of regular labour,
how a man in the cavalry had told him of the glorious times to be had in the
Legion, and how he had enlisted.

"Glorious times, truly," said Jacques as he was telling me this, "up at

daybreak, to bed at dark, drill, Swedish exercises, route-marching, firing-
range—the life of a camel and a halfpenny a day."

However that might be, Raboustel took his gruel, to use the expression
of Jacques, and didn't grumble over the taste of it. A bad sign. Everyone
grumbles in the Legion, and naturally, for the man who has sold his body
and soul for a halfpenny a day feels that he has something to grumble at.
The silent men and the men who keep up an appearance of unnatural
cheerfulness are the men likely to make trouble.

For the first couple of months, then, Raboustel, loathing the life that had
seized upon him, but saying nothing or next to nothing about his feelings on
the matter, seemed on the highway to one of the hundred forms of revolt
common to légionnaires.

Any day Jacques would not have been surprised to hear that Raboustel
had mutilated himself, or made an attempt to escape, or committed some act
equally mad and equally sure to lead to punishment or death.

But time went on and nothing happened, and then, strange to say,
Raboustel, so far from trying to run away or attempting some mad act, all at
once became cheerful—really and unfeignedly cheerful—and began to
grumble at the small pin-pricks of an Algerian soldier's life just like a
healthy légionnaire. He had fallen in love.

One evening, passing through Kassim Street, in the native quarter of the
town, he had stopped to admire the brass-work exposed for sale in a little
shop near the corner where Kassim Street is cut by the Street of the
Crescent. The owner of the shop, a Spanish Jew, Abraham Misas by name,
was not there. His daughter was looking after the place in his absence.

She was lying crouched on a rug in the dark interior of the shop, and
seeing what she supposed to be a customer looking at the wares, she came
forward.

A girl of sixteen or so, slight, dark, and beautiful as a dream.

When she saw that the customer was a légionnaire she was about to turn
away in disdain. Légionnaires never buy things, and consequently are
looked upon as scarcely human beings by the trading population of Sidi-
bel-Abbès.

However, before she had time to turn Raboustel spoke to her; there was
something in his voice that pleased her, and in a couple of minutes they
were chatting away one to the other quite amicably across the brassware, so
that a passer-by might have fancied them old acquaintances. They interested
one another immensely and at once, and their talk about nothing in
particular, the weather, the doings of the town and the Legion, had for each
of them the charm of a new and surprising adventure. She spoke French
with a Spanish accent. She asked him how long he had been with the
Legion, and how he liked the life, and in a moment he found himself telling
her all about himself, where he had come from and how he had joined the
regiment for the sake of a more active and interesting life than the life of a
vine-grower.

He had arrived at this when suddenly the girl broke off the conversation,
and an old man, looking something like Svengali grown grey, passed
Raboustel and entered the shop.
 Raboustel, with a glance at the girl, turned and went on his way. He was
very quick in the up-take, knew at once that the old man was the proprietor
of the place and almost exactly what his feelings would be to find his
daughter chatting to one of those penniless, good-for-nothing scamps of the
Legion.

He returned to barracks that night a changed man. He was not in love,

but the fact that someone had taken an interest in his affairs warmed his
heart, and then there was something in the knowledge that the person who
had taken interest in his poor affairs was a woman. Added to this, the
picture of the girl remained with him so vividly that it was the first thing he
saw on opening his eyes next morning. Love ought really to be represented
as a photographer. He does all his business by distributing pictures to his
clients, fatal pictures that they can't dispose of, or tear up, or destroy.

On parade Raboustel was looking at the girl's picture whilst receiving

orders, and it came between him and the target on the range that afternoon.
It filled him in the evening with such a burning desire to look at the original
that he walked down Kassim Street, only to be rewarded by the sight of her
father. The old man was sitting in the half-gloom of the shop, smoking
cigarettes and waiting for customers, and you may be sure that Raboustel as
he passed did nothing to attract his attention.

The next day the same thing happened, but on the third evening, as luck
would have it, the old man was away on some business and Manuella, that
was her name, was in the shop.

She came forward smiling and they talked together as before. Love
grows quickly in Algeria, especially when he is pressed for time, and before
they parted that night there was an understanding between these two, and
Raboustel returned to barracks in such a high state of spirits that his
companions fancied he had been drinking.

Now nothing much more disastrous can happen to a légionnaire than to

fall in love. It is not a common complaint amongst légionnaires; they have
little time or inclination for the business, and if they had who would look at
them or listen to them? A halfpenny a day, a position a little above that of a
convict—nice prospects to lay at the feet of any girl.
 Nothing more hopeless than this passion of Raboustel could be well
imagined, yet he never thought of that, and she never thought of it either.
They were in love one with the other, that was the only thing they thought
of. But the Legion was not to be denied or flouted. It had its revenge on this
man who dared to think of other things than the bitterness of life, who dared
to catch the white bird Love and hold it clasped to the tunic of a
légionnaire.

It hit him first in the pocket. Out of a halfpenny a day you cannot save
much to buy presents with, and the first instinct of a man in love is to offer
a present to the woman he loves.

Jacques at that time was carrying on a small traffic in birds, it was a

business he took up and dropped with the seasons, and as it happened to be
then the full swing of the season he was fairly occupied in his leisure hours
buying and trapping birds.

One day near the barracks he met Raboustel, noted that he was dejected
and out of sorts and asked the reason.

"It is nothing," said Raboustel.

"I know that nothing," replied the other. "I have suffered from it myself.
Come, out with it, is it the food that's making you sick?"

"I have nothing to say against the food."

"Ah, then it's just the barracks, I know that feeling."

"I have nothing to say against the barracks."

"You haven't!" cried Jacques, with a burst of laughter. "Then you must
be singularly easy to please. Ah, I know, you are homesick."

Raboustel laughed.

"I have not thought of home for a week. No, you are wrong, Corporal, it
is neither the food, nor the barracks, nor the thought of home that is
troubling me, it is something else."
 He told his position in a few words. He had come to care for a girl and
he had no money with which to buy her a present, nothing to offer her.

Jacques listened. At the word "girl" he had been on the point of laughing,
then he saw in a flash that this was a serious business for Raboustel.

The position of a man in the Legion is such that honest aspirations and
ambitions are absurd, unless they be purely military, and even then they are
rarely fulfilled, and as for love!

Jacques whistled when the other told him all.

"You will have trouble there," said he. "You will have the old man on top
of you; does he know about it?"

"Not he," said Raboustel.

"Well, he is sure to get to know, and then your trouble will begin. You
see, you are a légionnaire."

"Well, what of that?"

"What of that! Nom de Dieu! You wouldn't be asking 'what of that' if you
had a daughter in love with a légionnaire. You would be getting out a gun
and shooting him. Well, the thing is not to be helped. It is a matter
accomplished. When a man makes a fool of himself there is only one thing
to be said for the situation, it is a matter accomplished. When do you see
her?"

"In the evenings sometimes."

"Where?"

"Well," said Raboustel, "I saw her the first few times in the shop of her
father, lately she has come to speak to me at the corner of the Grand
Boulevard where it cuts the Street of the Crescent. She meets me there and
we talk. Sometimes we walk a bit in the Boulevard and she looks into the
shop windows, not wanting me to buy her things, you understand, but still,