Discussions of Specific Behaviors But Is Rarely Questioned

discussions of specific behaviors but is rarely questioned.
Social scientists in the 1970s broadly accepted two ideas about human
nature. First, people are generally rational, and their thinking is normally sound. Second, emotions such as fear, affection, and hatred
explain most of the occasions on which people depart from rationality. Our article challenged both assumptions without discussing
them directly. We documented systematic errors in the thinking of normal people, and we traced these errors to the design of the
machinery of cognition rather than to the corruption of thought by emotion.
Our article attracted much more attention than we had expected, and it remains one of the most highly cited works in social science
(more than three hundred scholarly articles referred to it in 2010). Scholars in other disciplines found it useful, and the ideas of
heuristics and biases have been used productively in many fields, including medical diagnosis, legal judgment, intelligence analysis,
philosophy, finance, statistics, and military strategy.
For example, students of policy have noted that the availability heuristic helps explain why some issues are highly salient in the
public’s mind while others are neglected. People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are
retrieved from memory—and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media. Frequently mentioned topics populate
the mind even as others slip away from awareness. In turn, what the media choose to report corresponds to their view of what is
currently on the public’s mind. It is no accident that authoritarian regimes exert substantial pressure on independent media. Because
public interest is most easily aroused by dramatic events and by celebrities, media feeding frenzies are common. For several weeks
after Michael Jackson’s death, for example, it was virtually impossible to find a television channel reporting on another topic. In
contrast, there is little coverage of critical but unexciting issues that provide less drama, such as declining educational standards or
overinvestment of medical resources in the last year of life. (As I write this, I notice that my choice of “little-covered” examples was
guided by availability. The topics I chose as examples are mentioned often; equally important issues that are less available did not
come to my mind.)
We did not fully realize it at the time, but a key reason for the broad appeal of “heuristics and biases” outside psychology was an
incidental feature of our work: we almost always included in our articles the full text of the questions we had asked ourselves and our
respondents. These questions served as demonstrations for the reader, allowing him to recognize how his own thinking was tripped
up by cognitive biases. I hope you had such an experience as you read the question about Steve the librarian, which was intended to
help you appreciate the power of resemblance as a cue to probability and to see how easy it is to ignore relevant statistical facts.
The use of demonstrations provided scholars from diverse disciplines— notably philosophers and economists—an unusual
opportunity to observe possible flaws in their own thinking. Having seen themselves fail, they became more likely to question the
dogmatic assumption, prevalent at the time, that the human mind is rational and logical. The choice of method was crucial: if we had
reported results of only conventional experiments, the article would have been less noteworthy and less memorable. Furthermore,
skeptical readers would have distanced themselves from the results by attributing judgment errors to the familiar l the
famifecklessness of undergraduates, the typical participants in psychological studies. Of course, we did not choose demonstrations
over standard experiments because we wanted to influence philosophers and economists. We preferred demonstrations because
they were more fun, and we were lucky in our choice of method as well as in many other ways. A recurrent theme of this book is that
luck plays a large role in every story of success; it is almost always easy to identify a small change in the story that would have
turned a remarkable achievement into a mediocre outcome. Our story was no exception.
The reaction to our work was not uniformly positive. In particular, our focus on biases was criticized as suggesting an unfairly
negative view of the mind. As expected in normal science, some investigators refined our ideas and others offered plausible
alternatives. By and large, though, the idea that our minds are susceptible to systematic errors is now generally accepted. Our
research on judgment had far more effect on social science than we thought possible when we were working on it.
Immediately after completing our review of judgment, we switched our attention to decision making under uncertainty. Our goal was
to develop a psychological theory of how people make decisions about simple gambles. For example: Would you accept a bet on the
toss of a coin where you win $130 if the coin shows heads and lose $100 if it s

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