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)

Krueger & Funder (K&F) correctly identify work on conformity, obedience, bystander (non)intervention, and social cognition as among social psychology's most memorable contributions, but they incorrectly portray that work as stemming from a “negative research orientation.” Instead, the work they cite stimulates compassion for the human actor by revealing the enormous complexity involved in deciding what to think and do in difficult, uncertain situations.