On Narrow Norms of Rationality and Questionable Data Analyses: A Comment on Jekel and Glockner

In many areas of psychology, it has been argued that people are equipped with a repertoire of strategies to solve the problems they face. Past work has also shown that in situations in which people receive feedback about the correctness of their inferences, substantial learning effects occur, such that simple heuristics that perform well in an environment also do well in describing people's inferences (e.g., Rieskamp, 2006; Rieskamp & Otto, 2006). This work has been challenged by Jekel and Glocker (2016), who argued that the simple heuristic was compared with a weak competitor. In this work, I reply to this challenge by showing that the competing compensatory strategy is not a weak competitor on either normative or descriptive empirical grounds. I show that the conclusions of past work also hold when includingas suggestedadditional compensatory strategies as competing models. The theoretical and empirical analysis demonstrates that the conclusions of Jekel and Glockner rely on narrow theoretical assumptions and questionable reanalyses of past results. Copyright (c) 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.