ABSTRACT
Most psychological theories of judgment and choice work from the premise that people make judgments and decisions in their functional capacities as intuitive scientists or economists. As intuitive scientists, we are hypothesized to be on an epistemological mission of achieving as accurate a mental representation of the external world, and the causal relations that hold that world together as possible (Fiske & Taylor, 1991). As intuitive economists, we are posited to be on a utilitarian mission organized around the maximization of subjective expected utility (Kagel & Roth, 1995). One advantage of adopting these functionalist frameworks has been a ready supply of elegant normative models for assessing judgmental biases and errors, and for justifying attributions of irrationality that have the net effect of making researchers look smart and research participants look, well, not so smart.
