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)

Although people can take spatial perspectives different from their own, it is widely assumed that egocentric perspectives are natural and have primacy. Two studies asked respondents to describe the spatial relations between two objects on a table in photographed scenes; in some versions, a person sitting behind the objects was either looking at or reaching for one of the objects. The mere presence of another person in a position to act on the objects induced a good proportion of respondents to (...) describe the spatial relations from that person’s point of view. When the query about the spatial relations was phrased in terms of action, more respondents took the other’s perspective than their own. The implication of action elicits spontaneous spatial perspective-taking, seemingly in the service of understanding the other’s actions. (shrink)

Depictive expressions of thought predate written language by thousands of years. They have evolved in communities through a kind of informal user testing that has refined them. Analyzing common visual communications reveals consistencies that illuminate how people think as well as guide design; the process can be brought into the laboratory and accelerated. Like language, visual communications abstract and schematize; unlike language, they use properties of the page (e.g., proximity and place: center, horizontal/up–down, vertical/left–right) and the marks on it (e.g., (...) dots, lines, arrows, boxes, blobs, likenesses, symbols) to convey meanings. The visual expressions of these meanings (e.g., individual, category, order, relation, correspondence, continuum, hierarchy) have analogs in language, gesture, and especially in the patterns that are created when people design the world around them, arranging things into piles and rows and hierarchies and arrays, spatial-abstraction-action interconnections termed spractions. The designed world is a diagram. (shrink)

This book presents the definitive exposition of 'prospect theory', a compelling alternative to the classical utility theory of choice. Building on the 1982 volume, Judgement Under Uncertainty, this book brings together seminal papers on prospect theory from economists, decision theorists, and psychologists, including the work of the late Amos Tversky, whose contributions are collected here for the first time. While remaining within a rational choice framework, prospect theory delivers more accurate, empirically verified predictions in key test cases, as well as (...) helping to explain many complex, real-world puzzles. In this volume, it is brought to bear on phenomena as diverse as the principles of legal compensation, the equity premium puzzle in financial markets, and the number of hours that New York cab drivers choose to drive on rainy days. Theoretically elegant and empirically robust, this volume shows how prospect theory has matured into a new science of decision making. (shrink)

Considers that intuitive predictions follow a judgmental heuristic-representativeness. By this heuristic, people predict the outcome that appears most representative of the evidence. Consequently, intuitive predictions are insensitive to the reliability of the evidence or to the prior probability of the outcome, in violation of the logic of statistical prediction. The hypothesis that people predict by representativeness was supported in a series of studies with both naive and sophisticated university students. The ranking of outcomes by likelihood coincided with the ranking by (...) representativeness, and Ss erroneously predicted rare events and extreme values if these happened to be representative. The experience of unjustified confidence in predictions and the prevalence of fallacious intuitions concerning statistical regression are traced to the representativeness heuristic. (shrink)

When thought overwhelms the mind, the mind uses the body and the world. Several studies reveal ways that people alone or together use gesture and marks on paper to structure and augment their thought for comprehension, inference, and discovery. The studies show that the mapping of thought to gesture or the page is more direct than the arbitrary mapping to language and suggest that these forms of visual/spatial/action representation are used to “translate” language into mental representations. It is argued that (...) actions in space create patterns in the world that reflect abstractions, that the actions are incorporated into gestures and the patterns into diagrams, a network that integrates gesture, action, the designed world, and abstraction dubbed spraction. (shrink)

When thought overwhelms the mind, the mind uses the body and the world. Several studies reveal ways that people alone or together use gesture and marks on paper to structure and augment their thought for comprehension, inference, and discovery. The studies show that the mapping of thought to gesture or the page is more direct than the arbitrary mapping to language and suggest that these forms of visual/spatial/action representation are used to “translate” language into mental representations. It is argued that (...) actions in space create patterns in the world that reflect abstractions, that the actions are incorporated into gestures and the patterns into diagrams, a network that integrates gesture, action, the designed world, and abstraction dubbed spraction. (shrink)

Our earliest tools are our bodies. Our hands raise and turn and toss and carry and push and pull, our legs walk and climb and kick allowing us to move and act in the world and to create the multitude of artifacts that improve our lives. The list of actions made by our hands and feet and other parts of our bodies is long. What is more remarkable is we turn those actions in the world into actions on thought through (...) gestures, language, and graphics, thereby creating cognitive tools that expand the mind. The focus here is gesture; gestures transform actions on perceptible objects to actions on imagined thoughts, carrying meaning with them rapidly, precisely, and directly. We review evidence showing that gestures enhance our own thinking and change the thought of others. We illustrate the power of gestures in studies showing that gestures uniquely change conceptions of time, from sequential to simultaneous, from sequential to cyclical, and from a perspective embedded in a timeline to an external perspective looking on a timeline, and by so doing obviate the ambiguities of an embedded perspective. We draw parallels between representations in gesture and in graphics; both use marks or actions arrayed in space to communicate more immediately than symbolic language. (shrink)

The mind constructs narratives from what would otherwise be chaos. Narratives viewed minimally—at least two temporally ordered events—are revealed in the way people talk about space and time. Narratives replete with a voice, causality, and emotion are reflected in the stories people tell about their own lives, stories that, as acknowledged by their tellers, distort the details around 60% of the time, but, according to their tellers, distort the 'truth' far less often.

Intuitive judgments of probability are based on a limited number of heuristics that are usually effective but sometimes lead to severe and systematic errors. Research shows, for example, that people judge the probability of a hypothesis by the degree to which it represents the evidence, with little or no regard for its prior probability. Other heuristics lead to an overestimation of the probabilities of highly available or salient events, and to overconfidence in the assessment of subjective probability distributions. These biases (...) are not readily corrected, and they are shared by both naive and statistically sophisticated subjects. The implications of the psychology of judgment to the analysis of rational behaviour are explored. (shrink)

Within psychology, at least two research communities study spatial cognition. One community studies systematic errors in spatial memory and judgement, accounting for them as a consequence of and clue to normal perceptual and cognitive processing. The other community studies navigation in real space, isolating the contributions of various sensory cues and sensori- motor systems to successful navigation. The former group emphasizes error, the latter, selective mechanisms, environmental or evolutionary, that produce fine-tuned correct responses. How can these approaches be reconciled and (...) integrated? First, by showing why errors are impervious to selective pressures. The schematization that leads to errors is a natural consequence of normal perceptual and cognitive processes; it is inherent to the construction of mental spaces and to using them to make judgments in limited capacity working memory. Selection can act on particular instances of errors, yet it is not clear that selection can act on the general mechanisms that produce them. Next, in the wild, there are a variety of correctives. Finally, closer examination of navigation in the wild shows systematic errors, for example, over-shooting in dead reckoning across species. Here, too, environments may provide correctives, specifically, landmarks. General cognitive mechanisms generate general solutions. The errors inevitably produced may be reduced by local specific sensori-motor couplings as well as local environmental cues. Navigation, and other behaviors as well, are a consequence of both. (shrink)

The search for new ideas often frustratingly cycles back to old ones, a phenomenon known as fixation. Recent research has shown ways to kick‐start finding new uses for familiar objects, a prototypical creativity task: wandering in the mind or the world or working on a messy desk. Those techniques seem to succeed by helping break fixation, but do not guide the search for new ideas. The perspective‐taking or human‐centric or empathic mindset championed by many in HCI and in design firms (...) does provide a search strategy. We compared the mind‐wandering mindset to a perspective‐taking mindset, the latter priming thinking of ways that people in different roles (gardener, artist, etc.) might use the objects. In two studies, the Perspective‐Taking mindset yielded more ideas and more original ideas than Mind‐Wandering, which did not differ from a No‐Mindset control. Original ideas came late, rewarding persistence. The perspective‐taking mindset is productive for problem‐solving, forecasting, and social interactions as well as innovation. (shrink)

People are not as fast or as strong as many other creatures that evolved around us. What gives us an evolutionary advantage is working together to achieve common aims. Coordinating joint action begins at a tender age with such cooperative activities as alternating babbling and clapping games. Adult joint activities are far more complex and use multiple means of coordination. Joint action has attracted qualitative analyses by sociolinguists, cognitive scientists, and philosophers as well as empirical analyses and theories by cognitive (...) scientists. Here, we analyze how joint action is spontaneously coordinated from start to finish in a novel complex real‐life joint activity, assembling a piece of furniture, a task that captures the essentials of joint action, collaborators, things in the world, and communicative devices. Pairs of strangers assembled a TV cart from a stack of parts and a photo of the completed cart. Coordination prior to each assembly action was coded as explicit, using speech or gesture, or implicit, actions that both advanced the task and communicated the next step. Initial planning relied on explicit communication about structure, but not action nor division of labor, which were improvised. That served to establish a joint representation of the goal that informed actions and monitored progress. As assembly progressed, coordination was increasingly implicit, through actions alone. Joint action is a dynamic interplay of explicit and implicit signaling with respect to things in the world to coordinate ongoing progress, guided by a shared representation of the goal. (shrink)

If people believe that some property is true of all members of a class such as sofas, then they should also believe that the same property is true of all members of a conjunctively defined subset of that class such as uncomfortable handmade sofas. A series of experiments demonstrated a failure to observe this constraint, leading to what is termed the inverse conjunction fallacy. Not only did people often express a belief in the more general statement but not in the (...) more specific, but also when they accepted both beliefs, they were inclined to give greater confidence to the more general. It is argued that this effect underlies a number of other demonstrations of fallacious reasoning, particularly in category-based induction. Alternative accounts of the phenomenon are evaluated, and it is concluded that the effect is best interpreted in terms of intensional reasoning [Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D.. Extensional versus intuitive reasoning: the conjunction fallacy in probability judgment. Psychological Review, 90, 293-315.]. (shrink)

The dissertation seeks answers to several foundational questions whose resolution is a necessary prerequisite to the development of a computational theory of metaphor processing. Working within a naturalistic framework, I address three main issues. Does metaphor fall within the domain of semantic theory or pragmatic theory? Is the concept of metaphor embedded in a 'folk' understanding of language and thought, and, if so, will the notion of metaphor-processing figure in any mature scientific psychology? Does the distinction between the metaphorical and (...) the literal inherently involve claims about truth and reference, and, if so, how can this distinction be addressed by a psychology that presupposes methodological solipsism? ;I defend the traditional, Aristotelean view which seeks to analyze both metaphors and similes in terms of underlying statements of comparison. This view implies that metaphors have semantic content, that they can, like literal claims, but true or false. I argue that Donald Davidson's analysis of meaning can, contrary to Davidson's own position, support this Aristotelean comparativist thesis. ;I then conclude that a semantic theory of metaphor must quantify over extra-psychological facts about the world. This raises the problems mentioned above concerning the psychological status of metaphor in a very pressing way. I reject both of the standard responses to these problems, eliminativism and sentential realism, and argue that explanations involving an extra-psychologically individuated type--such as metaphor--can constrain explanations involving a solipsistically individuated type. This offers some hope that an extensional theory of metaphor may be psychologically relevant. ;In Chapter Five I develop such an extensional theory. Through philosophical interpretation of work by some psychologists--principally A. Tversky and A. Ortony--I arrive at a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for the metaphoricity of an utterance. This definition constitutes the principal positive accomplishment of the dissertation. ;Chapter Six reviews some unsolved foundational problems for future attention, sets my project in the context of other philosophical work on metaphor, and then looks forward to a computational theory of metaphor processing. (shrink)

Framing effects occur when people respond differently to the same information, just because it is conveyed in different words. For example, in the classic ‘Disease Problem’ introduced by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, people’s choices between alternative interventions depend on whether these are described positively, in terms of the number of people who will be saved, or negatively in terms of the corresponding number who will die. In this paper, I discuss an account of framing effects based on ‘fuzzy-trace theory’. (...) The central claim of this account is that people represent the numbers in framing problems in a ‘gist-like’ way, as ‘some’; and that this creates a categorical contrast between ‘some’ people being saved (or dying) and ‘no’ people being saved (or dying). I argue that fuzzy-trace theory’s gist-like representation, ‘some’, must have the semantics of ‘some and possibly all’, not ‘some but not all’. I show how this commits fuzzy-trace theory to a modest version of a rival ‘lower bounding hypothesis’, according to which lower-bounded interpretations of quantities contribute to framing effects by rendering the alternative descriptions extensionally inequivalent. As a result, fuzzy-trace theory is incoherent as it stands. Making sense of it requires dropping, or refining, the claim that decision-makers perceive alternatively framed options as extensionally equivalent; and the related claim that framing effects are irrational. I end by suggesting that, whereas the modest lower bounding hypothesis is well supported, there is currently less evidence for the core element of the fuzzy trace account. (shrink)

The cognitive gain in the use of metaphor and simile is nicely elucidated by Tversky's theory of similarity. The features of the theory which are of special importance are the directionality and context-dependency of similarity judgments. These indicate the extent to which such judgments are classificatory and that similarity is not only the cause of an object's classification but is also a derivative of groupings. Metaphor and simile exploit certain cognitive features involved in the relation between classification, context and similarity (...) judgments so as to make possible the creation of similarity, which, from a conceptual standpoint, is the prime motivation for metaphor. (shrink)

In the present paper we empirically investigate the psychometric properties of some of the most famous statistical and logical cognitive illusions from the “heuristics and biases” research program by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who nearly 50 years ago introduced fascinating brain teasers such as the famous Linda problem, the Wason card selection task, and so-called Bayesian reasoning problems (e.g., the mammography task). In the meantime, a great number of articles has been published that empirically examine single cognitive illusions, theoretically (...) explaining people’s faulty thinking, or proposing and experimentally implementing measures to foster insight and to make these problems accessible to the human mind. Yet these problems have thus far usually been empirically analyzed on an individual-item level only (e.g., by experimentally comparing participants’ performance on various versions of one of these problems). In this paper, by contrast, we examine these illusions as a group and look at the ability to solve them as a psychological construct. Based on an sample ofN= 2,643 Luxembourgian school students of age 16–18 we investigate the internal psychometric structure of these illusions (i.e., Are they substantially correlated? Do they form a reflexive or a formative construct?), their connection to related constructs (e.g., Are they distinguishable from intelligence or mathematical competence in a confirmatory factor analysis?), and the question of which of a person’s abilities can predict the correct solution of these brain teasers (by means of a regression analysis). (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...