An ethnographer's account of his study of jazz-piano playing, which led to discoveries concerning the ways his hands learned about the keyboard and improvisation, sheds light on the nature and range of improvised conduct.

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)

A detailed study of scientific theories of human nature and the possible ways in which human behavior can be predicted and controlled.

Frankl's elaboration of his theory that man's primary motvational force is the search for meaning.

'With admirable clarity, Mrs Peters sums up what determines competence in spelling and the traditional and new approaches to its teaching.' -Times Literary Supplement.

This is a new release of the original 1949 edition.

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

The hypothesis of the study was that the domains of color and form are structured into nonarbitrary, semantic categories which develop around perceptually salient “natural prototypes.” Categories which reflected such an organization (where the presumed natural prototypes were central tendencies of the categories) and categories which violated the organization (natural prototypes peripheral) were taught to a total of 162 members of a Stone Age culture which did not initially have hue or geometric-form concepts. In both domains, the presumed “natural” categories (...) were consistently easier to learn than the “distorted” categories. Even when not central, natural prototype stimuli tended to be more rapidly learned and more often chosen as the most typical example of the category than were other stimuli. Implications for general differences between natural categories and the artificial categories of concept formation research were discussed. (shrink)