In a 1974 Science paper, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky argued that people routinely judge probability and frequency using a small set of mental shortcuts, heuristics, rather than by formal statistical reasoning, and that these heuristics, while usually efficient, produce systematic and predictable errors. The paper founded the heuristics-and-biases research program that reshaped judgment and decision-making research across psychology and behavioral economics, and underlies the pair's later prospect theory.
Facts
Disputed
Key FindingTversky and Kahneman identified three heuristics underlying judgment under uncertainty: representativeness, judging probability by how closely something resembles a prototype or stereotype; availability, judging frequency or probability by how easily examples come to mind; and anchoring and adjustment, estimating an unknown quantity by starting from an initial value and adjusting insufficiently away from it. Each heuristic is usually economical and effective but can produce large, systematic biases in specific, predictable circumstances. 2 That people rely on representativeness, availability and anchoring when judging under uncertainty, and that this reliance produces systematic, predictable deviations from formal probability in specific circumstances, is not itself disputed. What is genuinely contested, most prominently by Gerd Gigerenzer's ecological-rationality program, is whether those deviations are correctly described as biases against a single normative standard of rationality, or as heuristics that are well adapted to real-world information environments; see the dissent recorded on this fact. Method
Study DesignControlled Experiment (Lab or Field) 1 Connections
Associated With
Named and analyzed in Tversky and Kahneman's 1974 paper Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases.
Conducted By
In Branch
Sources
1. Heuristics in judgment and decision-making (Wikipedia)
2. Wikipedia: Heuristics in Judgment and Decision-Making
Wikimedia FoundationInformal models of heuristics sectionQuote, Informal models of heuristics section
A mental shortcut that occurs when people make judgements about the probability of events by the ease with which examples come to mind.
Dissenting Readings (1 dissenting reading)
Key Finding
Gerd Gigerenzer argues the heuristics-and-biases program overstates human irrationality on three grounds: empirically, several of its classic biases shrink or disappear when the same judgment problems are posed as natural frequencies rather than single-case probabilities; methodologically, labels like "representativeness" are vague and atheoretical, with limited power to explain the cognitive process actually at work; and normatively, the program assumes rather than argues for a single fixed standard of rational judgment. His own ecological-rationality program (with Daniel Goldstein and others) treats a heuristic's accuracy as contingent on the structure of the real-world information environment it operates in, not as a departure from a context-free rational norm.
A dissenting reading, from Gerd GigerenzerWikipedia: Heuristics in Judgment and Decision-Making, Wikimedia Foundation
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