On Fri, 15 Apr 2011 06:31:36 -0700, Scott O Lilienfeld writes: [snip] >....Also, of course, Kahneman’s Nobel 2002 prize and the >accompanying increased influence of work on biases and heuristics on >decision-making.
I'm not sure that I understand you here. Are you saying that as a result of Daniel Kahneman's winning of the Nobel prize (which would have also have gone to Amos Tversky if he had not died of melanoma a few years earlier), the concept of biases and heuristics became more widespread? A few points: (1) Tversky & Kahneman (1974) is one of the prominent references in the development of the theory that people use heuristics and biases instead of standard logical reasoning or random guessing (indeed, people are systematic but the rules and reasoning they use are wrong, so, they are systematic but wrong -- but generally close enough to the right answer for government work). See: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/185/4157/1124.short (2) Although T&K were mathematical psychologists (with a cognitive bent) social psychologists picked up on their theories quickly. This is shown in the 1986 Psych Review article by Robert Wyer and Thomas Srull; see: http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/rev/93/3/322/ Indeed, a cottage industry in social psychology/cognition developed to study how people navigated everyday social interactions through the used of heuristics and biases. (3) I'm not 100% sure of the following but I believe Lyn Abramson was one of the first clinical psychologists to promote the use of heuristics in explaining depression in her hopelessness theory of depression. An interesting book that ties these threads together is her 1988 edited volume "Social Cognition and Clinical Psychology"; see: http://books.google.com/books?id=R0NkQgAACAAJ&dq=lyn+abramson+clinical+social+psychology&hl=en&ei=DVSoTYX3I8Tz0gGOwpz5CA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CDwQ6AEwAg or http://tinyurl.com/abramson1988 (4) It is possible that the concept of heuristics and biases became better known to the general public around 2002 not because of Kahneman's winning of the Nobel prize but because Malcolm Gladwell started to write about automatic processing with heuristics in his New Yorker essays and the book "Blink" in which he writes about Gerd Gigerenzer's "fast and frugal heuristics" (ironically, Gigerenzer's position is that heuristics are not incorrect ways of reasoning, rather they are cost-effective methods of making decisions under conditions of incomplete information and uncertainty; Gigerenzer was critical of T&K on other points as well). (5) My contribution to what is interesting is the increased use of multilevel analysis and bayesian analysis both theory and statistical analysis. -Mike Palij New York University [email protected] --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=10052 or send a blank email to leave-10052-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
