Brighton's 2006 cross-validation reanalysis reversed Chater & Oaksford's take-the-best result, turning a direct terminological dispute into an empirical one

The dispute between ecological rationality and rational analysis is not only terminological; the two camps have clashed over a specific empirical question. Nick Chater and Mike Oaksford, with Nakisa and Redington, published "Fast, frugal, and rational: How rational norms explain behavior" (Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2003), testing Gigerenzer's take-the-best one-good-reason heuristic on the city-population problem against heavier competitors — "a three-layer feedforward connectionist network, trained using the backpropagation algorithm […]; two exemplar-based models […]; and the decision tree induction algorithm C4.5."

Gigerenzer & Brighton's 2009 "Homo Heuristicus" reports that Henry Brighton's 2006 reanalysis reversed the original verdict on methodological grounds: Chater et al.'s practice of "fitting the models on the learning sample and then testing these models on the entire sample (including the learning sample) favored those models that overfit the data, especially at high sample sizes." Under cross-validation instead, "The predictive accuracy of take-the-best exceeded that of all rival models over the entire range of sample sizes." The disagreement is thus over the correct test — in-sample fit versus out-of-sample prediction — with the choice of criterion flipping the result.

This is a direct, named, methodological dispute between researchers on each side of the divide over the same empirical question, not two schools publishing in parallel lanes — the empirical leg of the contested, not compatible reading in observation-ecological-rationality-and-rational-analysis-are-contested-not-compatible. The episode is recorded here from the Gigerenzer side only; whether the rational-analysis camp accepts Brighton's cross-validation framing or replied to it is unconfirmed and routed to question-corroborate-brighton-2006-take-the-best-reanalysis-chater-oaksford-reply.