About Ralph Hertwig

Ralph Hertwig is the Director of the Research Center for Adaptive Rationality at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany. His work looks in the psychology of human judgement and decision making. He earned his doctorate in psychology from the University of Konstanz in 1995. He has held appointments at Columbia University, University of Chicago, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the University of Basel.

Through his interdisciplinary research he has contributed, in particular, to the research on bounded rationality, decision from experience and the psychology of risk. He combined concepts and methods from psychology, neuroscience, economics, philosophy, biology and mathematics. His work has reshaped debates on whether human judgment should be judged by strict rules of logic or by how well it fits real-world environments. He also pioneered research on the description–experience gap in risk taking, showing how people treat rare events differently depending on how they learn about them. More recently, his work on deliberate ignorance and “boosting” has influenced policy design, health, and public decision making worldwide. He has been awarded The Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize in 2017.