HEURISTICS AND BIASES

Is our case strong enough to go to trial?

Will interest rates go up?

Can I trust this person?

Such questions – and the judgments required to answer them – are woven into the fabric of everyday experience.

This book examines how people make such judgments. The study of human judgment was transformed in the 1970s, when Kahneman and Tversky introduced their “heuristics and biases” approach and challenged the dominance of strictly rational models.

Their work highlighted the reflexive mental operations used to make complex problems manageable, and illuminated how the same processes can lead both to accurate and to dangerously flawed judgments.

The heuristics and biases framework generated a torrent of influential research in psychology – research that reverberated widely and affected scholarship in economics, law, medicine, management, and political science.

This book compiles the most influential research in the heuristic and biases tradition since the initial collection of 1982 (by Kahneman, Slovic, and Tversky). The various contributions develop and critically analyse the initial work on heuristics and biases, supplement these initial statements with emerging theory and empirical findings, and extend the reach of the framework to new real-world applications.

Editors

• Thomas Gilovich is Professor of Psychology at Cornell University and a member of the Cornell Center for Behavioral Economics and Decision Research.
• Dale Griffin is Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University.
• Daniel Kahneman is Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology and Professor of Public Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public Affairs, Princeton University.

Contents

Introduction – Heuristics and Biases: Then and Now (Thomas Gilovich and Dale Griffin)

PART ONE. THEORETICAL AND EMPIRICAL EXTENSIONS

A.   Representativeness and Availability

1   Extensional versus Intuitive Reasoning: The Conjunction Fallacy in Probability Judgment (Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman)

2   Representativeness Revisited: Attribute Substitution in Intuitive Judgment (Daniel Kahneman and Shane Frederick)

3   How Alike Is It? versus How Likely Is It?: A Disjunction Fallacy in Probability Judgments (Maya Bar-Hillel and Efrat Neter)

4   Imagining Can Heighten or Lower the Perceived Likelihood of Contracting a Disease: The Mediating     Effect of Ease of Imagery (Steven J. Sherman, Robert B. Cialdini, Donna F. Schwartzman, and Kim D.  Reynolds)

5   The Availability Heuristic Revisited: Ease of Recall and Content of Recall as Distinct Sources of Information (Norbert Schwarz and Leigh Ann Vaughn)

B.   Anchoring, Contamination, and Compatibility

6   Incorporating the Irrelevant: Anchors in Judgments of Belief and Value (Gretchen B.  Chapman and Eric J. Johnson)

7   Putting Adjustment Back in the Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristic (Nicholas Epley and Thomas Gilovich)

8   Self-Anchoring in Conversation: Why Language Users Do Not Do What They “Should” (Boaz Keysar and Dale J. Ban)

9   Inferential Correction (Daniel T. Gilbert)

10   Mental Contamination and the Debiasing Problem (Timothy D. Wilson, David B. Centerbar, and Nancy Brekke)

11   Sympathetic Magical Thinking: The Contagion and Similarity “Heuristics” (Paul Rozin and Carol Nemeroff)

12   Compatibility Effects in Judgment and Choice (Paul Slovic, Dale Griffin, and Amos Tversky)

C.   Forecasting, Confidence, and Calibration

13   The Weighing of Evidence and the Determinants of Confidence (Dale Griffin and Amos Tversky)

14   Inside the Planning Fallacy: The Causes and Consequences of Optimistic Time Predictions (Roger Buehler, Dale Griffin, and Michael Ross)

15   Probability Judgment across Cultures (J. Frank Yates, Ju-Whei Lee, Winston R. Sieck, Incheol Choi, and Paul C. Price)

16   Durability Bias in Affective Forecasting (Daniel T Gilbert, Elizabeth C. Pinel, Timothy D. Wilson, Stephen J. Blumberg, and Thalia P. Wheatley)

D.   Optimism

17   Resistance of Personal Risk Perceptions to Debiasing Interventions (Neil D. Weinstein and William M. Klein)

18   Ambiguity and Self-Evaluation: The Role of Idiosyncratic Trait Definitions In Self-Serving Assessments of Ability (David Dunning, Judith A. Meyerowitz, and Amy D. Holzberg)

19   When Predictions Fail:  The Dilemma of Unrealistic Optimism (David A. Armor and Shelley E. Taylor)

E.    Norms and Counterfactuals

20   Norm Theory: Comparing Reality to Its Alternatives (Daniel Kahneman and Dale T. Miller)

21   Counterfactual Thought, Regret, and Superstition: How to Avoid Kicking Yourself (Dale T. Miller and Brian R. Taylor)

PART TWO. NEW THEORETICAL DIRECTIONS

A.   Two Systems of Reasoning

22   Two Systems of Reasoning (Steven A. Sloman)

23   The Affect Heuristic (Paul Slovic, Melissa Finucane, Ellen Peters, and Donald G. MacGregor)

24   Individual Differences in Reasoning: Implications for the Rationality Debate? (Keith E. Stanovich and Richard F. West)

B.   Support Theory

25   Support Theory: A Nonextensional Representation of Subjective Probability (Amos Tversky and Derek J. Koehler)

26   Unpacking, Repacking, and Anchoring: Advances in Support Theory (Yuval Rottenstreich and Amos Tversky)

27   Remarks on Support Theory: Recent Advances and Future Directions (Lyle A. Brenner, Derek J. Koehler, and Yuval Rottenstreich)

C.   Alternative Perspectives on Heuristics

28   The Use of Statistical Heuristics in Everyday Inductive Reasoning (Richard E. Nisbett, David H. Krantz, Christopher Jepson, and Ziva Kunda)

29   Feelings as Information: Moods Influence Judgments and Processing Strategies (Norbert Schwarz)

30   Automated Choice Heuristics (Shane Frederick)

31   How Good Are Fast and Frugal Heuristics? (Gerd Gigerenzer, Jean Czerlinski, and Laura Martignon)

32   Intuitive Politicians, Theologians, and Prosecutors: Exploring the Empirical Implications of Deviant Functionalist Metaphors (Philip E. Tetlock)

PART THREE. REAL-WORLD APPLICATIONS

A.   Everyday Judgment and Behavior

33   The Hot Hand in Basketball: On the Misperception of Random Sequences (Thomas Gilovich, Robert Vallone, and Amos Tversky)

34   Like Goes with Like: The Role of Representativeness In Erroneous and Pseudo-Scientific Beliefs (Thomas Gilovich and Kenneth Savitsky)

35   When Less Is More: Counterfactual Thinking and Satisfaction among Olympic Medalists                (Victoria Husted Medvec, Scott F. Madey, and Thomas Gilovich)

36   Understanding Misunderstanding: Social Psychological Perspectives (Emily Pronin, Carolyn Puccio, and Lee Ross)

B.   Expert Judgment

37   Assessing Uncertainty in Physical Constants (Max Henrion and Baruch Fischhoff)

38   Do Analysts Overreact? (Werner P. M. De Bondt and Richard H. Thaler)

39   The Calibration of Expert Judgment: Heuristics and Biases Beyond the Laboratory (Derek J. Koehler, Lyle Brenner, and Dale Griffin)

40   Clinical versus Actuarial Judgment (Robyn M. Dawes, David Faust, and Paid E. Meehl)

41   Heuristics and Biases in Application (Baruch Fischhoff)

42   Theory-Driven Reasoning about Plausible Pasts and Probable Futures In World Politics (Philip E. Tetlock)

References

Index