Heuristics and Biases

2002/07/08 by Thomas Gilovich, Dale Griffin, Daniel 1934-2024 Kahneman · 4 citations
Decision Sciences · Social Sciences · Psychology · #Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics #Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies #Psychology of Social Influence #Heuristics #Scholarship #Reflexivity #Prospect theory #Cognitive bias #Epistemology #Social heuristics #Psychology #Dominance (genetics) #Social psychology #Positive economics #Computer science #Sociology #Cognition #Political science #Social science #Economics #Law

paper · doi:10.1017/cbo9780511808098

openalex publication_date 2002/07/08 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05

Abstract

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).

Citations

• Givenness, Contrastiveness, Definiteness, Subjects, Topics, and Point of View
• Subjective Construal, Social Inference, and Human Misunderstanding
• Prediction of goal-directed behavior: Attitudes, intentions, and perceived behavioral control
• Intuitive prediction: Biases and corrective procedures
• Nonanalytic Cognition: Memory, Perception, and Concept Learning
• Psychological Barriers to Dispute Resolution
• Implicit social cognition: Attitudes, self-esteem, and stereotypes.
• Habit and intention in everyday life: The multiple processes by which past behavior predicts future behavior.
• Self–other judgments and perceived vulnerability to victimization.
• Belief in the law of small numbers.
• Back to Bentham? Explorations of Experienced Utility
• Are conjunction rule violations the result of conversational rule violations?
• On the psychology of prediction.
• Egocentric biases in availability and attribution.
• Are we all less risky and more skillful than our fellow drivers?
• A model of egoistical relative deprivation.
• The correspondence bias.
• Causes and Effects of My Disturbing Little Book
• On the Failure to Eliminate Hypotheses in a Conceptual Task
• On the process of comparing sentences against pictures
• Directional Questions Direct Self-Conceptions
• Individuals with sociopathic behavior caused by frontal damage fail to respond autonomically to social stimuli
• Hindsight is not equal to foresight: The effect of outcome knowledge on judgment under uncertainty.
• Distribution of probability assessments for almanac and future event questions
• Goal Achievement: The Role of Intentions
• Do those who know more also know more about how much they know?
• Self-Linking and Self-Competence as Dimensions of Global Self-Esteem: Initial Validation of a Measure
• Equating Inverse Probabilities in Implicit Personality Judgments
• The psychology of sunk cost
• The halo effect: Evidence for unconscious alteration of judgments.
• Clinical Versus Actuarial Judgment
• Accountability: A Social Check on the Fundamental Attribution Error
• Weighting Systems for Linear Functions of Correlated Variables When There is no Dependent Variable
• Subjective probability: A judgment of representativeness
• Preference and belief: Ambiguity and competence in choice under uncertainty
• On the sensitivity of regression and regressors.
• Illusory correlation as an obstacle to the use of valid psychodiagnostic signs.
• Generality of learned helplessness in man.
• Knowing with certainty: The appropriateness of extreme confidence.
• Craps and Magic
• Biased assimilation and attitude polarization: The effects of prior theories on subsequently considered evidence.
• On the psychophysical law.
• Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability
• A power primer.
• Patients' memories of painful medical treatments: real-time and retrospective evaluations of two minimally invasive procedures
• The base rate fallacy reconsidered: Descriptive, normative, and methodological challenges
• Regret Theory: An Alternative Theory of Rational Choice Under Uncertainty
• Advances in prospect theory: Cumulative representation of uncertainty
• A New Vector Partition of the Probability Score
• The dependence of the conjunction fallacy on subtle linguistic factors
• Support theory: A nonextensional representation of subjective probability.
• Theory and research concerning social comparisons of personal attributes.
• Adult Egocentrism: Subjective Experience versus Analytic Bases for Judgment
• The robust beauty of improper linear models in decision making.
• Confirmatory and diagnosing strategies in social information gathering.
• Linear models in decision making.
• The 1973 Least-Squares Adjustment of the Fundamental Constants
• Features of similarity.
• Are humans good intuitive statisticians after all? Rethinking some conclusions from the literature on judgment under uncertainty
• An Inventory for Measuring Depression
• You don't know me, but I know you: The illusion of asymmetric insight.
• Validity and utility of alternative predictors of job performance.
• The totalitarian ego: Fabrication and revision of personal history.
• VERIFICATION OF FORECASTS EXPRESSED IN TERMS OF PROBABILITY
• Toward an instance theory of automatization.
• Determinants of satisfaction for entrepreneurs
• Overconfidence and Excess Entry: An Experimental Approach
• The experience of regret: What, when, and why.
• Self-schemata and processing information about the self.
• Narcissism beyond Gestalt and awareness: The name letter effect
• Choosing versus rejecting: Why some options are both better and worse than others
• Judged frequency of lethal events.
• The “false consensus effect”: An egocentric bias in social perception and attribution processes
• Perception of Risk
• Perception in chess
• Entrepreneurs' perceived chances for success
• On narrow norms and vague heuristics: A reply to Kahneman and Tversky.
• The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice
• Attitudinal effects of mere exposure.
• The theory of planned behavior
• The base-rate fallacy in probability judgments
• The Third-Person Effect in Communication
• Comparative efficiency of informal (subjective, impressionistic) and formal (mechanical, algorithmic) prediction procedures: The clinical–statistical controversy.
• The attribution of attitudes
• Perseverance of social theories: The role of explanation in the persistence of discredited information.
• Unit weighting schemes for decision making
• The hot hand in basketball: On the misperception of random sequences
• The Functional Approach to the Study of Attitudes
• On the Social Psychology of Agency Relationships: Lay Theories of Motivation Overemphasize Extrinsic Incentives
• Cultural Differences in Probabilistic Thinking
• What forecasts (seem to) mean
• Confirmation, disconfirmation, and information in hypothesis testing.
• Does Living in California Make People Happy? A Focusing Illusion in Judgments of Life Satisfaction
• The unbearable automaticity of being.
• Intelligence: Knowns and unknowns.
• "General Intelligence," Objectively Determined and Measured
• How safe is safe enough? A psychometric study of attitudes towards technological risks and benefits
• Self-perception: An alternative interpretation of cognitive dissonance phenomena.
• Leading questions and the eyewitness report
• Presentation and content: The use of base rates as a continuous variable.
• From Thought to Action: Effects of Process-Versus Outcome-Based Mental Simulations on Performance
• Does the Stock Market Overreact?
• Ambiguity Aversion and Comparative Ignorance
• Unrealistic optimism about future life events.
• On the reality of cognitive illusions.
• Regret in Decision Making under Uncertainty
• Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments.
• Ease of retrieval as information: Another look at the availability heuristic.
• The case for motivated reasoning.
• Probabilistic mental models: A Brunswikian theory of confidence.
• Half a century of research on the Stroop effect: An integrative review.
• The optimal impact phenomenon: beyond the third person effect
• Appraising and Amending Theories: The Strategy of Lakatosian Defense and Two Principles that Warrant It
• A Theory of Social Comparison Processes
• Reasoning the fast and frugal way: Models of bounded rationality.
• Extensional versus intuitive reasoning: The conjunction fallacy in probability judgment.
• Anomalies: The Endowment Effect, Loss Aversion, and Status Quo Bias
• Reluctance to vaccinate: Omission bias and ambiguity
• Individual differences in reasoning: Implications for the rationality debate?
• Intuitive theories of events and the effects of base-rate information on prediction.
• Clinical versus mechanical prediction: A meta-analysis.
• Illusion and well-being: A social psychological perspective on mental health.
• Upper and Lower Probabilities Induced by a Multivalued Mapping
• The Makings of the Magical Mind: The Nature and Function of Sympathetic Magical Thinking
• Epistemics: The Regulative Theory of Cognition
• Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk
• Fuzzy sets as a basis for a theory of possibility
• Differential construal and the false consensus effect.
• Distributed memory and the representation of general and specific information.
• The psychology of the unthinkable: Taboo trade-offs, forbidden base rates, and heretical counterfactuals.
• A new look at anchoring effects: Basic anchoring and its antecedents.
• The hostile media phenomenon: Biased perception and perceptions of media bias in coverage of the Beirut massacre.
• Rational Choice and the Framing of Decisions
• Lake Wobegon be gone! The "below-average effect" and the egocentric nature of comparative ability judgments.
• Harnessing the imagination: Mental simulation, self-regulation, and coping.
• Models of Man.
• Sensitivity to indirect contacts with other persons: AIDS aversion as a composite of aversion to strangers, infection, moral taint, and misfortune.
• They saw a game; a case study.
• Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases
• Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change.
• The psychology of interpersonal relations.
• Resistance of personal risk perceptions to debiasing interventions.

Cited by

• The Evolution of Cognitive Bias
• Evidence-Based Practice and Policy: Choices Ahead
• Arousal, valence, and volume: how the influence of online review characteristics differs with respect to utilitarian and hedonic products
• Rationality
• Paul E. Meehl [wikipedia]