In this paper, we explore the literature on cognitive heuristics and biases in light of virtue epistemology, specifically highlighting the two major positions—agent-reliabilism and agent-responsibilism —as they apply to dual systems theories of cognition and the role of motivation in biases. We investigate under which conditions heuristics and biases might be characterized as vicious and conclude that a certain kind of intellectual arrogance can be attributed to an inappropriate reliance on Type 1, or the improper (...) function of Type 2, cognitive processes. By the same token, the proper intervention of Type 2 processes results in the virtuous functioning of our cognitive systems. Moreover, the role of motivation in attenuating cognitive biases and the cultivation of certain epistemic habits points to the tenets of agent-responsibilism.. (shrink)

This article described three heuristics that are employed in making judgements under uncertainty: representativeness, which is usually employed when people are asked to judge the probability that an object or event A belongs to class or process B; availability of instances or scenarios, which is often employed when people are asked to assess the frequency of a class or the plausibility of a particular development; and adjustment from an anchor, which is usually employed in numerical prediction when a relevant (...) value is available. These heuristics are highly economical and usually effective, but they lead to systematic and predictable errors. A better understanding of these heuristics and of the biases to which they lead could improve judgements and decisions in situations of uncertainty. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Mental arithmetic is characterised by a tendency to overestimate addition and to underestimate subtraction results: the operational momentum effect. Here, motivated by contentious explanations of this effect, we developed and tested an arithmetic heuristics and biases model that predicts reverse OM due to cognitive anchoring effects. Participants produced bi-directional lines with lengths corresponding to the results of arithmetic problems. In two experiments, we found regular OM with zero problems but reverse OM with non-zero problems. In a third experiment, (...) we tested the prediction of our model. Our results suggest the presence of at least three competing biases in mental arithmetic: a more-or-less heuristic, a sign-space association and an anchoring bias. We conclude that mental arithmetic exhibits shortcuts for decision-making similar to traditional domains of reasoning and problem-solving. (shrink)

Stuart Rachels and Larry Temkin have offered a purported counterexample to the acyclicity of the relationship “all things considered better than”. This example invokes our intuitive preferences over pairs of alternatives involving a single person’s painful experiences of varying intensity and duration. These preferences, Rachels and Temkin claim, are confidently held, entirely reasonable, and cyclical. They conclude that we should drop acyclicity as a requirement of rationality. I argue that, together with the findings of recent research on the way people (...) evaluate episodes of pain, the use of a heuristic known as similarity-based decision-making explains why our intuitive preferences may violate acyclicity in this example. I argue that this explanation should lead us to regard these preferences with suspicion, because it indicates that they may be the result of one or more biases. I conclude that Rachels’ and Temkin’s example does not provide sufficient grounds for rejecting acyclicity. (shrink)

Stuart Rachels and Larry Temkin have offered a purported counterexample to the acyclicity of the relationship “all things considered better than”. This example invokes our intuitive preferences over pairs of alternatives involving a single person’s painful experiences of varying intensity and duration. These preferences, Rachels and Temkin claim, are confidently held, entirely reasonable, and cyclical. They conclude that we should drop acyclicity as a requirement of rationality. I argue that, together with the findings of recent research on the way people (...) evaluate episodes of pain, the use of a heuristic known as similarity-based decision-making explains why our intuitive preferences may violate acyclicity in this example. I argue that this explanation should lead us to regard these preferences with suspicion, because it indicates that they may be the result of one or more biases. I conclude that Rachels’ and Temkin’s example does not provide sufficient grounds for rejecting acyclicity. (shrink)

The thirty-five chapters in this book describe various judgmental heuristics and the biases they produce, not only in laboratory experiments but in important...

Although economists often model decision makers as rational actors, the heuristics and biases literature that springs from the work of Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman and his late colleague Amos Tversky demonstrates that people make decisions that depart from the optimal model in systematic ways. These cognitive and behavioral limitations not only cause inefficient decision making, but also lead people to make decisions that are unethical. This article seeks to introduce a selected portion of the heuristics and (...) biases and related psychological literature, to highlight its implications for ethical decision making, and to serve as the basis for a lecture that could inform students regarding these matters. If business actors are on guard against errors in their own decision making processes, perhaps they can avoid some of the ethical pitfalls that recently put Enron and so many other companies in the news. (shrink)

Approaching science by considering the epistemological virtues which scientists see as constitutive of good science, and the way these virtues trade-off against one another, makes it possible to capture action that may be lost by approaches which focus on either the theoretical or institutional level. Following Wimsatt (1984) I use the notion of heuristics and biases to help explore a case study from the history of biology. Early in the 20th century, mutation theorists and natural historians fought over (...) the role that isolation plays in evolution. This debate was principally about whether replication was the central scientific virtue (and hence the ultimate goal of science to replace non-experimental evidence with experimental evidence) or whether consilience of inductions was the central virtue (and hence, as many kinds of evidence as possible should be pursued). (shrink)

Gigerenzer’s ‘external validity argument’ plays a pivotal role in his critique of the heuristics and biases research program (HB). The basic idea is that (a) the experimental contexts deployed by HB are not representative of the real environment and that (b) the differences between the setting and the real environment are causally relevant, because they result in different performances by the subjects. However, by considering Gigerenzer’s work on frequencies in probability judgments, this essay attempts to show that there (...) are fatal flaws in the argument. Specifically, each of the claims is controversial: whereas (b) is not adequately empirically justified, (a) is inconsistent with the ‘debiasing’ program of Gigerenzer’s ABC group. Therefore, whatever reason we might have for believing that the experimental findings of HB lack experimental validity, this should not be based on Gigerenzer’s version of the argument. (shrink)

The target article's finding of stable and general individual differences in solving of problems in heuristics-and-biases experiments is fundamentally subversive to the Meliorist research program's attention-getting claim that human thought is “systematically irrational.” Since some people get these problems right, studies of heuristics and biases may reduce to repeated demonstrations that difficult questions are hard to solve.

How does a complex organism develop from a relatively simple, homogeneous mass? The usual answer is: through the execution of species-specific genetic instructions specifying the development of that organism. Commentators are sometimes sceptical of this usual answer, but of course not all commentators. Some biologists refer to master control genes responsible for the activation of all the genes responsible for every aspect of organismal development; and some philosophers, most notoriously Rosenberg, buy this claim hook, line, and sinker. Here I explore (...) both the seeming plausibility of the usual position, and also its ultimate inadequacy. (shrink)

Dual-processes theories of cognition implicitly assume universality of the human mind. However, research has shown that large-scale differences exist in thinking styles across cultures. Thereby, the universality of the effects found in Western samples remains an open empirical question. Here, we explored whether effects predicted by prospect theory, such as the framing effect, would be observed in a sample of 312 Bulgarian students. Overall, the size of the framing effect was smaller than in the original studies. Most notably, we failed (...) to reproduce the framing effect in the famous Asian Disease problem, using a rating response format. In a between-subjects design, decision- making performance was completely independent of university admission grades. We propose that studying the size of the effects across cultures is needed in order to establish the effects’ level of universality. More broadly, we suggest ways in which knowledge of cultural settings can help elaborate or test dual-process predictions. (shrink)

How does a complex organism develop from a relatively simple, homogeneous mass? The usual answer is: through the (context‐dependent) execution of species‐specific genetic instructions specifying the development of that organism. Commentators are sometimes skeptical of this usual answer, but of course not all commentators, and not always for the same reasons. Here I attempt to lay bare the logical structure of the usual answer through an extended analysis of the heuristics and methodological principles at play in the exploration and (...) explanation of development—and also to show a critical ambiguity that renders the usual answer suspect. (shrink)

We argue that the interaction of biased media coverage and widespread employment of the recognition heuristic can produce epistemic injustices. First, we explain the recognition heuristic as studied by Gerd Gigerenzer and colleagues, highlighting how some of its components are largely external to, and outside the control of, the cognitive agent. We then connect the recognition heuristic with recent work on the hypotheses of embedded, extended, and scaffolded cognition, arguing that the recognition heuristic is best understood as an instance of (...) scaffolded cognition. In section three, we consider the double-edged sword of cognitive scaffolding. On the one hand, scaffolds can reduce the internal processing demands on cognitive agents while increasing their access to information. On the other hand, the use of scaffolding leaves cognitive agents increasingly vulnerable to forming false beliefs or failing to form beliefs at all about particular topics. With respect to the recognition heuristic, agents rely on third parties (such as the media) to report not just what’s true but also what’s important or valuable. This makes cognitive agents relying on these third parties vulnerable to two erroneous influences: 1) because they don’t recognize something, it isn’t important or valuable, and 2) because they do recognize something, it is important or valuable. Call the latter the Kardashian Inference and the former the Darfur Inference. In section four, we use Fricker’s (2007) concept of epistemic injustice to characterize the nature and harm of these false inferences, with special emphasis on the Darfur Inference. In section five, we use data-mining and an empirical study to show how Gigerenzer’s population estimation task is liable to produce Darfur Inferences. We conclude with some speculative remarks on more important Darfur Inferences, and how to avoid them by scaffolding better. One primary way to accomplish this it to shift the burden of embodying the virtue of epistemic justice from the hearer or consumer of media to the media themselves. (shrink)

Despite the increasing recognition that heuristics may be involved in myriad scientific activities, much about how to use them prudently remains obscure. As typically defined, heuristics are efficient rules or procedures for converting complex problems into simpler ones. But this increased efficiency and problem-solving power comes at the cost of a systematic bias. As Wimsatt showed, biased modelling heuristics can conceal errors, leading to poor decisions or inaccurate models. This liability to produce errors presents a fundamental challenge (...) to the philosophical value of heuristic analyses. Heuristics may be powerful and efficient procedures, but their practical value for science and epistemology is significantly mitigated if we do not have a principled methodology for knowing how to use them wisely. In this essay, I extend Wimsatt’s analyses to argue that this challenge for a heuristic methodology can be met by appealing to second-order, or meta-, heuristics—that is, practical guidelines that prescribe the appropriate conditions for a first-order heuristic’s use. 1 Introduction2 Background3 Heuristics and Meta-heuristics4 A Hierarchical Model and Three Applications4.1 Decision making in emergency medicine4.2 Mathematical explanation in physics4.3 Resilience in ecological management5 Conclusion. (shrink)

: This paper develops four related claims: 1. Critical thinking should focus more on decision making, 2. the heuristics and bias literature developed by cognitive psychologists and behavioral economists provides many insights into human irrationality which can be useful in critical thinking instruction, 3. unfortunately the “rational choice” norms used by behavioral economists to identify “biased” decision making narrowly equate rational decision making with the efficient pursuit of individual satisfaction; deviations from these norms should not be treated as an (...) irrational bias, 4. a richer, procedural theory of rational decision making should be the basis for critical thinking instruction in decision making. (shrink)

There is a large literature on social epistemology, some of which is concerned with expert knowledge. Formal representations of the aggregation of decisions, estimates, and the like play a larger role in these discussions. Yet these discussions are neither sufficiently social nor epistemic. The assumptions minimize the role of knowledge, and often assume independence between observers. This paper presents a more naturalistic approach, which appeals to a model of epistemic gain from others, as mutual consilience—a genuinely social notion of epistemology. (...) Using the example of Michael Polanyi’s account of science as an illustration, it introduces the notion of double heuristics: that individuals, each with their own heuristics, each with cognitive biases and limitations, are aggregated by a decision procedure, like voting, and this second order procedure produces its own heuristic, with its own cognitive biases and limitations. An example might be the limited ability of democracies to assimilate expert knowledge. (shrink)

Cognitive scientists have identified a wide range of biases and heuristics in human decision making over the past few decades. Only recently have bioethicists begun to think seriously about the implications of these findings for topics such as agency, autonomy, and consent. This article aims to provide an overview of biases and heuristics that have been identified and a framework in which to think comprehensively about the impact of them on the exercise of autonomous decision making. (...) I analyze the impact that these biases and heuristics have on the following dimensions of autonomy: understanding, intentionality, absence of alienating or controlling influence, and match between formally autonomous preferences or decisions and actual choices or actions. (shrink)

Our programmatic article on Homo heuristicus (Gigerenzer & Brighton, 2009) included a methodological section specifying three minimum criteria for testing heuristics: competitive tests, individual-level tests, and tests of adaptive selection of heuristics. Using Richter and Späth’s (2006) study on the recognition heuristic, we illustrated how violations of these criteria can lead to unsupported conclusions. In their comment, Hilbig and Richter conduct a reanalysis, but again without competitive testing. They neither test nor specify the compensatory model of inference they (...) argue for. Instead, they test whether participants use the recognition heuristic in an unrealistic 100% (or 96%) of cases, report that only some people exhibit this level of consistency, and conclude that most people would follow a compensatory strategy. We know of no model of judgment that predicts 96% correctly. The curious methodological practice of adopting an unrealistic measure of success to argue against a competing model, and to interpret such a finding as a triumph for a preferred but unspecified model, can only hinder progress. Marewski, Gaissmaier, Schooler, Goldstein, and Gigerenzer (2010), in contrast, specified five compensatory models, compared them with the recognition heuristic, and found that the recognition heuristic predicted inferences most accurately. (shrink)

ABSTRACTHumans are cognitive misers because their basic tendency is to default to processing mechanisms of low computational expense. Such a tendency leads to suboptimal outcomes in certain types of hostile environments. The theoretical inferences made from correct and incorrect responding on heuristics and biases tasks have been overly simplified, however. The framework developed here traces the complexities inherent in these tasks by identifying five processing states that are possible in most heuristics and biases tasks. The framework (...) also identifies three possible processing defects: inadequately learned mindware; failure to detect the necessity of overriding the miserly response; and failure to sustain the override process once initiated. An important insight gained from using the framework is that degree of mindware instantiation is strongly related to the probability of successful detection and override. Thus, errors on such tasks cannot be unambiguously attributed to miserly processing – and corre... (shrink)

Individuals’ propensity not to override the first answer that comes to mind is thought to be a crucial cause behind many failures in reasoning. In the present study, we aimed to explore the strategies used and the abilities employed when individuals solve the cognitive reflection test, the most widely used measure of this tendency. Alongside individual differences measures, protocol analysis was employed to unfold the steps of the reasoning process in solving the CRT. This exploration revealed that there are several (...) ways people solve or fail the test. Importantly, 77% of the cases in which reasoners gave the correct final answer in our protocol analysis, they started their response with the correct answer or with a line of thought which led to the correct answer. We also found that 39% of the incorrect responders reflected on their first response. The findings indicate that the suppression of the first answer may not be the only crucial feature of reflectivity in the CRT and that the lack of relevant knowledge is a prominent cause of the reasoning errors. Additionally, we confirmed that the CRT is a multi-faceted construct: both numeracy and reflectivity account for performance. The results can help to better apprehend the “whys and whens” of the decision errors in heuristics and biases tasks and to further refine existing explanatory models. (shrink)

Methodological reductionists practice ‘wannabe reductionism’. They claim that one should pursue reductionism, but never propose how. I integrate two strains in prior work to do so. Three kinds of activities are pursued as “reductionist”. “Successional reduction” and inter-level mechanistic explanation are legitimate and powerful strategies. Eliminativism is generally ill-conceived. Specific problem-solving heuristics for constructing inter-level mechanistic explanations show why and when they can provide powerful and fruitful tools and insights, but sometimes lead to erroneous results. I show how traditional (...) metaphysical approaches fail to engage how science is done. The methods used do so, and support a pragmatic and non-eliminativist realism. (shrink)

We have evolved to become who we are, at least in part, due to our general drive to create new things and ideas. When seeking to improve our creations, ideas, or situations, we systematically overlook opportunities to perform subtractive changes. For example, when tasked with giving feedback on an academic paper, reviewers will tend to suggest additional explanations and analyses rather than delete existing ones. Here, we show that this addition bias is systematically reflected in English language statistics along several (...) distinct dimensions. First, we show that words associated with an increase in quantity or number (e.g., add, addition, more, most) are more frequent than words associated with a decrease in quantity or number (e.g., subtract, subtraction, less, least). Second, we show that in binomial expressions, addition-related words are mentioned first, that is, add and subtract rather than subtract and add. Third, we show that the distributional semantics of verbs of change, such as to improve and to transform, overlap more with the distributional semantics of add/increase than subtract/decrease, which suggests that change verbs are implicitly biased toward addition. Fourth, addition-related words have more positive connotations than subtraction-related words. Fifth, we demonstrate that state-of-the-art large language models, such as the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT-3), are also biased toward addition. We discuss the implications of our results for research on cognitive biases and decision-making. (shrink)

We present empirical evidence from social psychological research which suggests that standard methods employed when teaching the heuristics and biases program in the context of critical thinking instruction are likelier to facilitate the discernment and correction of biases in others’ reasoning than to have a similar effect in the self-monitoring case. Exemplified by the social phenomenon of false polarization, we suggest that CT instruction may be improved by fostering student’s abilities at counterfactual meta-cognition, and present a corresponding (...) teaching and learning activity. (shrink)

Individual differences have been neglected in decision-making research on heuristics and cognitive biases. Addressing that issue requires having reliable measures. The author first reviewed the research on the measurement of individual differences in cognitive biases. While reliable measures of a dozen biases are currently available, our review revealed that some measures require improvement and measures of other key biases are still lacking (e.g., confirmation bias). We then conducted empirical work showing that adjustments produced a significant (...) improvement of some measures and that confirmation bias can be reliably measured. Overall, our review and findings highlight that the measurement of individual differences in cognitive biases is still in its infancy. In particular, we suggest that contextualized (in addition to generic) measures need to be improved or developed. (shrink)

If citizens’ behavior threatens to harm others or seems not to be in their own interest, it is not uncommon for governments to attempt to change that behavior. Governmental policy makers can apply established tools from the governmental toolbox to this end. Alternatively, they can employ new tools that capitalize on the wealth of knowledge about human behavior and behavior change that has been accumulated in the behavioral sciences. Two contrasting approaches to behavior change are nudge policies and boost policies. (...) These policies rest on fundamentally different research programs on bounded rationality, namely, the heuristics and biases program and the simple heuristics program, respectively. This article examines the policy–theory coherence of each approach. To this end, it identifies the necessary assumptions underlying each policy and analyzes to what extent these assumptions are implied by the theoretical commitments of the respective research program. Two key results of this analysis are that the two policy approaches rest on diverging assumptions and that both suffer from disconnects with the respective theoretical program, but to different degrees: Nudging appears to be more adversely affected than boosting does. The article concludes with a discussion of the limits of the chosen evaluative dimension, policy–theory coherence, and reviews some other benchmarks on which policy programs can be assessed. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to identify the manifestations of speciesism in the history of research into theory of mind in non-human animals and, more importantly, to identify the cognitive biases that contribute to the adoption of incautious and, as we will see in later chapters, often misinterpretations of empirical research. The influence of speciesism is also visible in broadly understood animal studies. The manifestations of species-related chauvinism are present, inter alia, in in considerations on the theory of (...) mind. An analysis of the already classic articles by Premarck and Woodruff (1978) and Calla and Tomasello (2011) reveals an attempt to maintain faith in human uniqueness. Maintaining this belief sometimes involves constructing careless interpretations. (shrink)

The program of research now known as the heuristics and biases approach began with a study of the statistical intuitions of experts, who were found to be excessively confident in the replicability of results from small samples. The persistence of such systematic errors in the intuitions of experts implied that their intuitive judgments may be governed by fundamentally different processes than the slower, more deliberate computations they had been trained to execute. The ancient idea that cognitive processes can (...) be partitioned into two main families--traditionally called intuition and reason--is now widely embraced under the general label of dual-process theories. Dual-process models come in many flavors, but all distinguish cognitive operations that are quick and associative from others that are slow and governed by rules. To represent intuitive and deliberate reasoning, we borrow the terms "system 1" and "system 2" from Stanovich and West. In the following section, we present an attribute-substitution model of heuristic judgment, which assumes that difficult questions are often answered by substituting an answer to an easier one. Following sections introduce a research design for studying attribute substitution, as well as discuss the controversy over the representativeness heuristic in the context of a dual-system view that we endorse. The final section situates representativeness within a broad family of prototype heuristics, in which properties of a prototypical exemplar dominate global judgments concerning an entire set. (shrink)

From the seventies onward a large quantity of theoretical and empirical studies have investigated the heuristic principles and cognitive strategies that individuals use to deal with risky and uncertain situations. This research has shown how the explicative and predictive shortcomings of normative risk analysis depend in many respects on undervaluing the continuous interaction between the individual and the environment. There are factors that, day by day, represent significant obstacles to decision making.

Most philosophical accounts of emergence are incompatible with reduction. Most scientists regard a system property as emergent relative to properties of its parts if it depends upon their mode of organization-a view consistent with reduction. Emergence is a failure of aggregativity, in which ``the whole is nothing more than the sum of its parts''. Aggregativity requires four conditions, giving powerful tools for analyzing modes of organization. Differently met for different decompositions of the system, and in different degrees, the structural conditions (...) can provide evaluation criteria for choosing decompositions, ``natural kinds'', and detecting functional localization fallacies, approximations, and various biases of vulgar reductionisms. This analysis of emergence and use of these conditions as heuristics is consistent with a broader reductionistic methodology. (shrink)

A cognitive bias is a pattern of deviation in our judgment or our processing of what we perceive. Its raison d'être is the evolutionary need to produce immediate judgments in order to adopt a position quickly in response to stimuli, problems, or situations that catch our attention for some reason. They have a social dimension because they are present in the interactions and decision-making processes of ordinary life. They can be understood to be an adaptive response to human inability to (...) process all of the available information that we receive and selectively filter through biased reasoning or through procedures and heuristic rules. (shrink)

Belief bias is the tendency for prior beliefs to influence people's deductive reasoning in two ways: through the application of a simple belief-heuristic and through the application of more effortful reasoning for unbelievable conclusions. Previous research indicates that cognitive ability is the primary determinant of the effect of beliefs on accuracy. In the current study, we show that the mere tendency to engage analytic reasoning is responsible for the effect of cognitive ability on motivated reasoning. The implications of this finding (...) for our understanding of the impact of individual differences on belief bias are discussed. (shrink)

Research into mathematics often focuses on basic numerical and spatial intuitions, and one key property of numbers: their magnitude. The fact that mathematics is a system of complex relationships that invokes reasoning usually receives less attention. The purpose of this special issue is to highlight the intricate connections between reasoning and mathematics, and to use insights from the reasoning literature to obtain a more complete understanding of the processes that underlie mathematical cognition. The topics that are discussed range from the (...) basic heuristics and biases to the various ways in which complex, effortful reasoning contributes to mathematical cognition, while also considering the role of individual differences in mathematics performance. These investigations are not only important at a theoretical level, but they also have broad and important practical implications, including the possibility to improve classroom practices and educational outcomes, to facilitate people's decision-making, as well as the clear and accessible communication of numerical information. (shrink)

is normative in the sense that it aims to make recommendations for improving human judgment; it aims to have a practical impact on morally and politically significant human decisions and actions; and it studies normative, rational judgment qua rational judgment. These nonstandard ways of understanding ACP as normative collectively suggest a new interpretation of the strong replacement thesis that does not call for replacing normative epistemic concepts, relations, and inquiries with descriptive, causal ones. Rather, it calls for recognizing that the (...) aims and normative inquiries of epistemology and normative psychology have become intermutual in nature. Key Words: Heuristics and biases • applied cognitive psychology • normative psychology • rationality • naturalized epistemology • Epistemics • Applied Naturalized Epistemology • strong replacement • strategic reliabilism • ameliorative psychology. (shrink)

Cimpian et al. observed that we accept generic statements of the form ‘Gs are f’ on relatively weak evidence, but that if we are unfamiliar with group G and we learn a generic statement about it, we still treat it inferentially in a much stronger way: all Gs are f. This paper makes use of notions like ‘representativeness’, ‘contingency’ and ‘relative difference’ from psychology to provide a uniform semantics of generics that explains why people accept generics based on weak evidence. (...) The spirit of the approach has much in common with Leslie’s cognition-based ideas about generics, but the semantics will be grounded on a strengthening of Cohen’s relative readings of generic sentences. In contrast to Leslie and Cohen, we propose a uniform semantic analysis of generics. The basic intuition is that a generic of the form ‘Gs are f’ is true because f is typical for G, which means that f is valuably associated with G. We will make use of Kahneman and Tversky’s Heuristics and Biases approach, according to which people tend to confuse questions about probability with questions about representativeness, to explain pragmatically why people treat many generic statements inferentially in a much stronger way. (shrink)

This essay lays the groundwork for a novel conception of autonomy that may be called “effective autonomy”—a conception designed to be genuinely action guiding in bioethics. As empirical psychology research on the heuristics and biases approach shows, decision making commonly fails to correspond to people’s desires because of the biases arising from bounded cognition. People who are classified as autonomous on contemporary philosophical accounts may fail to be effectively autonomous because their decisions are uncoupled from their autonomous (...) desires. Accordingly, continuing attempts to value patient autonomy must go beyond existing philosophical conceptions of autonomy to consider the background conditions of human decision making. (shrink)

Current psychology of human reasoning is divided into several different approaches. For instance, there is a major dispute over the question whether human beings are able to apply norms of the formal models of rationality such as rules of logic, or probability and decision theory, correctly. While researchers following the “heuristics and biases” approach argue that we deviate systematically from these norms, and so are perhaps deeply irrational, defenders of the “bounded rationality” approach think not only that the (...) evidence for this conclusion is problematic but also that we should not, at least not very often, use formal norms in reasoning. I argue that while the evidence for heuristics and biases is indeed questionable, the bounded rationality approach has its limits too. Most especially, we should not infer that formal norms play no role in a comprehensive theory of rationality. Instead, formal and bounded rules of reasoning might even be connected in a more comprehensive theory of rationality. (shrink)

Bayesian reasoning, defined here as the updating of a posterior probability following new information, has historically been problematic for humans. Classic psychology experiments have tested human Bayesian reasoning through the use of word problems and have evaluated each participant’s performance against the normatively correct answer provided by Bayes’ theorem. The standard finding is of generally poor performance. Over the past two decades, though, progress has been made on how to improve Bayesian reasoning. Most notably, research has demonstrated that the use (...) of frequencies in a natural sampling framework —as opposed to single-event probabilities—can improve participants’ Bayesian estimates. Furthermore, pictorial aids and certain individual difference factors also can play significant roles in Bayesian reasoning success. The mechanics of how to build tasks which show these improvements is not under much debate. The explanations for why naturally-sampled frequencies and pictures help Bayesian reasoning remain hotly contested, however, with many researchers falling into ingrained “camps” organized around two dominant theoretical perspectives. The present paper evaluates the merits of these theoretical perspectives, including the weight of empirical evidence, theoretical coherence, and predictive power. By these criteria, the ecological rationality approach is clearly better than the heuristics and biases view. Progress in the study of Bayesian reasoning will depend on continued research that honestly, vigorously, and consistently engages across these different theoretical accounts rather than staying “siloed” within one particular perspective. The process of science requires an understanding of competing points of view, with the ultimate goal being integration. (shrink)

Nonmonotonic reasoning is often claimed to mimic human common sense reasoning. Only a few studies, though, have investigated this claim empirically. We report four experiments which investigate three rules of SYSTEMP, namely the AND, the LEFT LOGICAL EQUIVALENCE, and the OR rule. The actual inferences of the subjects are compared with the coherent normative upper and lower probability bounds derived from a non-infinitesimal probability semantics of SYSTEM P. We found a relatively good agreement of human reasoning and principles of nonmonotonic (...) reasoning. Contrary to the results reported in the ‘heuristics and biases’ tradition, the subjects committed relatively few upper bound violations (conjunction fallacies). (shrink)

The heuristics-and-biases approach requires a clear separation of normative and descriptive models. Normative models cannot be justified by intuition, or by consensus. The lack of consensus on normative theory is a problem for prescriptive approaches. One solution to the prescriptive problem is to argue contingently: if you are concerned about consequences, here is a way to make them better.

Although reasoning has been characterized as the essence of our being, it is often prone to cognitive biases. Decades of research in the reasoning and decision making fields have shown that when fa...

Mark Kelman’s recent book, The Heuristics Debate (HD), has two main goals. First, it seeks to reconstruct the controversy in decision science between Kahneman et al.’s heuristics-and-biases approach and Gigerenzer et al.’s fast-and-frugal heuristics approach. Second, it tries to discuss its implications for jurisprudence and policy-making. This study focuses on the first task only. The study attempts to show that, although HD has several important merits, its interpretation of the controversy misses some crucial aspects. Specifically, HD (...) fails to appreciate that the debate is fundamentally about what a “rational” judgment is in the first place. Moreover, because of this, HD also fails to acknowledge the interplay between normative and methodological considerations. With regard to this aspect, HD’s treatment of the controversy fits into a long tradition. This study takes the opportunity to rectify the error. (shrink)

Much research in the last two decades has demonstrated that human responses deviate from the performance deemed normative according to various models of decision making and rational judgment (e.g., the basic axioms of utility theory). This gap between the normative and the descriptive can be interpreted as indicating systematic irrationalities in human cognition. However, four alternative interpretations preserve the assumption that human behavior and cognition is largely rational. These posit that the gap is due to (1) performance errors, (2) computational (...) limitations, (3) the wrong norm being applied by the experimenter, and (4) a different construal of the task by the subject. In the debates about the viability of these alternative explanations, attention has been focused too narrowly on the modal response. In a series of experiments involving most of the classic tasks in the heuristics and biases literature, we have examined the implications of individual differences in performance for each of the four explanations of the normative/descriptive gap. Performance errors are a minor factor in the gap; computational limitations underlie non-normative responding on several tasks, particularly those that involve some type of cognitive decontextualization. Unexpected patterns of covariance can suggest when the wrong norm is being applied to a task or when an alternative construal of the task should be considered appropriate. Key Words: biases; descriptive models; heuristics; individual differences; normative models; rationality; reasoning. (shrink)