Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment

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, first published in 2002, 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 to both accurate and 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 heuristics and biases tradition since the initial collection of 1982 (by Kahneman, Slovic, and Tversky).

Table of Contents:
Introduction: heuristics and biases then and now; Part I. Theoretical and Empirical Extensions: 1. Extensional versus intuitive reasoning: the conjunction fallacy in probability judgment; 2. Representativeness revisited: attribute substitution in intuitive judgment; 3. How alike is it versus how likely it is: a disjunction fallacy in probability judgments; 4. Imagining can heighten or lower the perceived likelihood of contracting a disease: the mediating effect of ease of imagery; 5. The availability heuristic revisited: ease of recall and content of recall as distinct sources of information; 6. Incorporating the irrelevant: anchors in judgments of belief and value; 7. Putting adjustment back in the anchoring and adjustment heuristic: differential processing of self-generate and experimenter-provided anchors; 8. Self anchoring in conversation: why language users don't do what they 'should'; 9. Inferential correction; 10. Mental contamination and the debiasing problem; 11. Sympathetic magical thinking: the contagion and similarity 'heuristics'; 12. Compatibility effects in judgment and choice; 13. The weighing of evidence and the determinants of confidence; 14. Inside the planning fallacy: the causes and consequences of optimistic time predictions; 15. Probability judgment across cultures; 16. Durability bias in affective forecasting; 17. Resistance of personal risk perceptions to debiasing interventions; 18. Ambiguity and self-evaluation: the role of idiosyncratic trait definitions in self-serving assessments of ability; 19. When predictions fail: the dilemma of unrealistic optimism; 20. Norm theory: comparing reality to its alternatives; 21. Counterfactual thought, regret, and superstition: how to avoid kicking yourself; Part II. New Theoretical Directions: 22. Two systems of reasoning; 23. The affect heuristic; 24. Individual differences in reasoning: implications for the rationality debate?; 25. Support theory: a nonextensional representation of subjective probability; 26. Unpacking, repacking, and anchoring: advances in support theory; 27. Remarks on support theory: recent advances and future directions; 28. The use of statistical heuristics in everyday inductive reasoning; 29. Feelings as information: moods influence judgments and processing strategies; 30. Automated choice heuristics; 31. How good are fast and frugal heuristics?; 32. Intuitive politicians, theologians, and prosecutors: exploring the empirical implications of deviant functionalist metaphors; Part III. Real World Applications: 33. The hot hand in basketball: on the misperception of random sequences; 34. Like goes with like: the role of representativeness in erroneous and pseudoscientific beliefs; 35. When less is more: counterfactual thinking and satisfaction among Olympic medalists; 36. Understanding misunderstanding: social psychological perspectives; 37. Assessing uncertainty in physical constants; 38. Do analysts overreact?; 39. The calibration of expert judgment: Heuristics and biases beyond the laboratory; 40. Clinical versus actuarial judgment; 41. Heuristics and biases in application; 42. Theory driven reasoning about plausible pasts and probable futures in world politics.

Review :
Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment; offers a massive, state-of-the-art treatment of the literature, supplementing a similar book published two decades ago...This is an impressive book, full of implications for law and policy." Cass Sunstein, University of Chicago Law School "...the book should serve well as a reference work for researchers in cognitive science and as a textbook for advanced courses in that difficult topic. Philosophers interested in cognitive science will also wish to consult it." Metapsychology Online Review "Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment is a scholarly treat, one that is sure to shape the perspectives of another generation of researchers, teachers, and graduate students. The book will serve as a welcome refresher course for some readers and a strong introduction to an important research perspective for others." Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology