ABSTRACT
IDO EREV, DVORIT SHIMONOWITCH, and AMOS SCHURR Israel Institute of Technology
RALPH HERTWIG University of Basel
I n his book Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History, the late Harvard paleontologist Gould (1992) concluded that “our minds are not built (for whatever reason) to work by the rules of probability” (p. 469). Coming from a scientist whose thinking was deeply rooted in evolutionary theorizing, this proclamation was, well, unexpected. It implies nothing less than that our cognitive machinery is somehow out of synchrony with the probabilistic structure of the world. Gould’s epiphany was inspired by the ndings of one of the most inuential, recent research programs in cognitive psychology: the heuristics-and-biases program (e.g., Kahneman, Slovic, & Tversky, 1982). According to this program, when dealing with the twilight of uncertainty, people rely on a limited number of simplifying heuristics rather than more formal and computationally and informationally more extensive algorithmic processing. The heuristics are regarded as typically yielding accurate judgments but also giving rise to systematic errors. Recently, the heuristics, often regarded as “general purpose heuristics-availability, representativeness, and anchoring and adjustment” (Gilovich, Grifn, & Kahneman, 2002, p. xv), have been identied with a mental system akin to “intuition” (see Epstein, chap. 2, this volume; Epstein, 1994; Stanovich & West, 2000).
