ABSTRACT
In the first 20 years or so of my research career, my main interest was in the study of cognitive biases, mostly in reasoning but also in judgement and decision making. The heuristic-analytic theory was developed primarily to give an account of such biases. Meanwhile bias research, especially that of Tversky and Kahneman and their followers, engendered a great debate about the implications for human rationality, following a famous paper by the philosopher Jonathan Cohen (1981). Proponents of human rationality, such as Cohen, attacked the psychological literature on cognitive biases on various grounds. He represented a position often described as Panglossian, meaning that he believed that human irrationality could not be demonstrated by experimental psychologists, and that all evidence of error and bias could be explained away. For a while I ignored the debate, believing the issues to be more philosophical than psychological. However, I became very concerned when people referred to my work as demonstrating or claiming to demonstrate irrationality, as they often did. I had never made this claim myself.
