Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Lejarraga, Tomás
• Hertwig, Ralph
• Johnson, Blair T

Titel

How Experimental Methods Shaped Views on Human Competence and Rationality

Ist Teil von

• Psychological bulletin, 2021-06, Vol.147 (6), p.535-564

Ort / Verlag

United States: American Psychological Association

Erscheinungsjahr

2021

Quelle

Applied Social Sciences Index & Abstracts (ASSIA)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Within just 7 years, behavioral decision research in psychology underwent a dramatic change: In 1967, Peterson and Beach (1967) reviewed more than 160 experiments concerned with people's statistical intuitions. Invoking the metaphor of the mind as an intuitive statistician, they concluded that "probability theory and statistics can be used as the basis for psychological models that integrate and account for human performance in a wide range of inferential tasks" (p. 29). Yet in a 1974 Science article, Tversky and Kahneman rejected this conclusion, arguing that "people rely on a limited number of heuristic principles which reduce the complex tasks of assessing probabilities and predicting values to simple judgmental operations" (p. 1124). With that, they introduced the heuristics-and-biases research program, which has profoundly altered how psychology, and the behavioral sciences more generally, view the mind's competences and rationality. How was this radical transformation possible? We examine a previously neglected driver: The heuristics-and-biases program established an experimental protocol in behavioral decision research that relied on described scenarios rather than learning and experience. We demonstrate this shift with an analysis of 604 experiments, which shows that the descriptive protocol has dominated post-1974 research. Specifically, we examine two lines of research addressed in the intuitive-statistician program (Bayesian reasoning and judgments of compound events) and two lines of research spurred by the heuristics-and-biases program (framing and anchoring and adjustment). We conclude that the focus on description at the expense of learning has profoundly shaped the influential view of the error-proneness of human cognition. Public Significance StatementSound statistical intuitions are essential for navigating an uncertain world. The intuitive-statistician program of the 1960s concluded that probability theory and statistics can be used as the basis for psychological models of judgment. In contrast, research starting in the 1970s-spearheaded by the heuristics-and-biases program-has concluded that people lack the correct mental software for many important judgmental tasks. Our systematic review of experimental methods shows that the source of these conflicting conclusions may be traceable to a methodological shift triggered by the heuristics-and-biases program, which largely removed learning from judgment tasks.