ABSTRACT
Several years ago Shulman and Elstein (1975) wrote a paper that compared models of problem solving, judgment, and decision making. Their purpose at that time was to highlight the importance of various models for research on teaching, where the teacher is considered as an information processor and a decision maker. Included in their literature review was a series of papers by Kahneman and Tversky which dealt with the subject of intuitive probabilistic estimates for the likelihood of events (Kahneman & Tversky, 1972, 1973a, 1973b, 1974; Tversky & Kahneman, 1971). This series of papers has largely been responsible for stimulating a decade of psychological research on people’s intuitive use of probability to make judgments or decisions. Recent excellent summaries of the research on decision making are contained in a synthesis of the literature on human inference by Nisbett and Ross (1980) and in an anthology of papers on judgment under uncertainty (Kahneman, Slovic, & Tversky, 1982).
