Overview: In the late '60s, the consensus regarding judgment under uncertainty was that people, by and large, behave in accord with normative (or rational) statistical models. In the early '70s, Tversky and Kahneman revolutionized thinking about this area by arguing that people rely on a few simple cognitive shortcuts (heuristics) that lead to systematic errors (biases). This new view led research in the area to mesh better with cognitive psychology by focusing on the cognitive processes underlying judgment. Although the heuristics-and-biases paradigm has had a large impact on all social sciences and some applied areas (e.g., business, law, medicine), it has come under constant attack. We'll discuss the paradigm, why it has come under constant attack, recent developments, and alternate perspectives.

Requirements: Thoughtful reading and discussion are required. Participants must do all the reading each week and come to class prepared to discuss it. Grades will be based on class participation. Short papers might also be required (in which case they will also influence grades).

Week 1 (Apr 6): 1950's: Psychology gets introduced to decision making

(Note: These are both landmark papers. The Edwards review article is long and somewhat technical. No need to pore over it (unless you want to, of course); just get a feel for the ground covered, and how it's covered. Read the Simon article in its entirety, however.)

Edwards, E. (1954). The theory of decision making. Psychological Bulletin, 51, 380-417. [pdf]

Simon, H. A. (1956). Rational choice and the structure of the environment. Psychological Review, 63, 129-138. [pdf]

Week 2 (Apr 13): 1960's: Some tentative conclusions about the relation between behavior and rationality

(Note: No need to pore over either reading. Just get a feel for the types of tasks studied, how they are studied, and the conclusions drawn.)

Peterson, C. R., & Beach, L. R. (1967). Man as an intuitive statistician. Psychological Bulletin, 68, 29-46. [pdf]

Edwards, W. (1982). Conservatism in human information processing. In D. Kahneman, P. Slovic, & A. Tversky (Eds.), Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases (pp. 359-369). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Excerpts from a chapter in B. Kleinmuntz (Ed.), Formal representation of human judgment (pp. 17-52), 1968. New York: Wiley.) [pdf]

Week 3 (Apr 20): Heuristics, biases, and some discontent

Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1972). Subjective probability: A judgment of representativeness. Cognitive Psychology, 3, 430-454. [pdf]

Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science, 1974, 185, 1124-1131. [pdf]

Einhorn, H. J., & Hogarth, R. M. (1981). Behavioral decision theory: Processes of judgment and choice. Annual Review of Psychology, 32, 53-88. [pdf]

Week 4 (Apr 27): Defending and extending the paradigm

Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1982). On the study of statistical intuitions. Cognition, 11, 123-141. [pdf]

Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1983). Extensional versus intuitive reasoning: The conjunction fallacy in probability judgment. Psychological Review, 90, 293-315. [pdf]

Week 5 (May 4): More criticism; and a response

Gigerenzer, G. (1991). How to make cognitive illusions disappear: Beyond "heuristics and biases." European Review of Social Psychology, 2, 83-115. [pdf]

Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1996). On the reality of cognitive illusions. Psychological Review, 103, 582-591. [pdf]

Gigerenzer, G. (1996). On narrow norms and vague heuristics: A reply to Kahneman and Tversky. Psychological Review, 103, 592-596. [pdf]

Week 6 (May 11): Is poor performance more interesting than good performance?

Christensen-Szalanski, J. J. J., & Beach, L. R. (1984). The citation bias: Fad and fashion in the judgment and decision literature. American Psychologist, 39, 75-78. [pdf]

Lopes, L. L. (1991). The rhetoric of irrationality. Theory & Psychology, 1, 65-82. [pdf]

Davis, M. S. (1971). That's interesting! Towards a phenomonelogy of sociology and a sociology of phenomenology. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 1, 309-344. [pdf]

Week 7 (May 18): Some recent-ish developments I

Kahneman, D. & Frederick, S. (2002). Representativeness revisited: Attribute substitution in intuitive judgment. In T. Gilovich, D. Griffin, and D. Kahneman (Eds.), Heuristics and biases: The psychology of intuitive judgment (pp. 49-81). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [pdf]

Slovic, P., Finucane, M., Peters, E., & MacGregor, D. G. (2002). The affect heuristic. In T. Gilovich, D. Griffin, and D. Kahneman (Eds.), Heuristics and biases: The psychology of intuitive judgment (pp. 397-420). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [pdf]

Recommended: McKenzie, C. R. M., & Sher, S. (2016). Gamble evaluation and evoked reference sets: Why adding a small loss to a gamble increases its attractiveness. Unpublished manuscript. [pdf]

Week 8 (May 25): Some recent-ish developments II

Gilovich, T., & Griffin, D. (2002). Heuristics and biases: Then and now. In T. Gilovich, D. Griffin, and D. Kahneman (Eds.), Heuristics and biases: The psychology of intuitive judgment (pp. 1-18). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [pdf]

Funder, D. C. (1987). Errors and mistakes: Evaluating the accuracy of social judgment. Psychological Bulletin, 101, 75-90. [pdf]

Week 9 (Jun 1): A Nobel Prize

Kahneman, D. (2003). A perspective on judgment and choice: Mapping bounded rationality. American Psychologist, 58, 697-720. [pdf]

Gigerenzer, G. (1991). On cognitive illusions and rationality. Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities, 21, 225-249. [pdf]

Recommended: Geisler, W. S., & Kersten, D. (2002). Illusions, perception, and Bayes. Nature Neuroscience, 5, 508-510. [pdf]

Week 10 (Jun 8): Some recent-ish developments III

Thaler, R. H., & Sunstein, C. R. (2008). Nudge: Improving decisons about health, wealth, and happiness. Yale University Press. (Introduction and Chapter 1, pp 1-39.) [pdf]

McKenzie, C. R. M., Sher, S., Leong, L. M., & Mueller-Trede, J. (2018). Constructed preference, coherence violations, and rationality. (Working paper -- final draft will appear in Review of Behavioral Economics.) [pdf]

Recommended: McKenzie, C. R. M. (2005). Judgment and decision making. In K. Lamberts and R. L. Goldstone (Eds.), Handbook of cognition (pp. 321-338). London: Sage. [pdf]