Nick Chater

Cognitive scientist and, with Mike Oaksford, co-architect of the rational analysis / Bayesian-rationality programme — the view that human reasoning should be measured against optimal inference under uncertainty rather than formal logic. He matters to the vault as the standing representative of the Bayesian-optimization pole in its "the yardstick was wrong, not the reasoner" cluster, defined in explicit empirical and methodological tension with Gigerenzer's ecological rationality — most sharply in the still-unresolved dispute over whether Brighton's 2006 cross-validation reanalysis reversed Chater, Oaksford, Nakisa & Redington's 2003 take-the-best result, a reversal this camp has never been found to have replied to.

References

• claim-oaksford-chater-redefine-rationality-as-reasoning-about-uncertainty · claim-oaksford-chater-recast-wason-task-as-optimal-data-selection · claim-brighton-2006-reanalysis-reversed-take-the-best-result-against-chater-oaksford · claim-no-chater-oaksford-reply-to-brighton-2006-reanalysis-located
• claim-lieder-griffiths-2020-cite-oaksford-chater-1994-as-worked-example · claim-lieder-griffiths-2020-name-chater-oaksford-1999-as-rational-analysis-source
• Captures: 2026-08-02-did-the-chateroaksford-camp-reply-to-brightons-2006, 2026-09-20-bipartite-two-things-this-vault-knows-in-different

Updates

• 2026-09-20: Lieder & Griffiths (2020) cite his and Oaksford's 1994 Wason-task paper by name as a worked example of rational analysis, and cite their joint 1999 retrospective — not Anderson (1990) alone — as the source for the term "rational analysis" itself. He and Oaksford are cited as co-definers of the field's name, not only as independent appliers of it. (claim-lieder-griffiths-2020-cite-oaksford-chater-1994-as-worked-example, claim-lieder-griffiths-2020-name-chater-oaksford-1999-as-rational-analysis-source)
• 2026-10-10: a third Lieder & Griffiths (2020) citation located — his and Oaksford's 2007 book Bayesian Rationality itself, in a five-work psychology background list, thinner than the 1994/1999 citations (claim-lieder-griffiths-2020-cite-oaksford-chater-2007-bayesian-rationality-in-background-list). More substantively, their logic-to-probability revision sits one step earlier in the same lineage resource-rational analysis narrates: that article lists probability theory among the three classical norms it supersedes (claim-lieder-griffiths-2020-list-probability-theory-among-three-classical-norms-resource-rationality-supersedes) and performs their signature swap-the-yardstick move in its own "Rationality revisited" section (claim-resource-rational-analysis-rationality-revisited-swaps-normative-yardstick-same-move-as-oaksford-chater). This uncertainty-redefinition pairing is a hedged, genealogical bridge rather than a direct citation (observation-oaksford-chater-uncertainty-redefinition-resource-rational-pairing-is-genealogical-bridge).
• 2026-10-24: his and Oaksford's own 1999 retrospective — not just the 2007 book / 2009 précis the vault's "swap the yardstick" claims were sourced from — itself performs that signature move, recasting the Wason selection task as optimal data selection so apparent irrationality dissolves under a swapped standard, eight years earlier (claim-chater-oaksford-1999-retrospective-itself-performs-yardstick-swap-on-wason-task). That makes the paper Lieder & Griffiths cite for the paradigm's name a confirmed bridge to resource-rational analysis's §5.4 yardstick-swap (observation-chater-oaksford-1999-name-citation-section-5-4-swap-confirmed-bridge).