Chapter 12 notes that researchers such as Kahneman and Tversky are pessimistic about our decision-making skills, whereas researchers such as Gigerenzer are more optimistic. The optimists emphasize that

"the pessimists underestimate our decision-making accuracy because of factors such as choosing questions that contradict people's schemas"

Explanation:

Thaler is together with Daniel Khaneman one of the parents of behavioral economics. This branch focuses on explaining and even looking for meaning in our economic behavior. In other words, why we make the decisions we make regarding our money.

In many social sciences, two different points of view about our rationality coexist today: the pessimist, who sees our limitations as systematic errors at the root of our possible irrational behavior; and the optimist, who conceives these limits as ecological advantages. The first point of view, the pessimist, is maintained by Tversky and Kahneman in their research program on heuristics and biases, and is also based on the theory of "little shoves" or nudges, which Thaler and Sunstein propose following that approach of Tversky and Kahneman.

The second, the optimist, has been developed by Gerd Gigerenzer and the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition (ABC) at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, and by other evolutionary psychologists such as Leda Cosmides and John Tooby.