ABSTRACT
The initial reception of “Judgment under Uncertainty” was almost exclusively positive— once its readers understood that Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman were not saying that humans are inherently stupid. Tversky and Kahneman replied to a few specific criticisms— for instance to Jonathan Cohen’s 1979 article in which he claimed that the mathematical model they had used to highlight the representativeness heuristic was wrong, and that their normative model should use a different model of probability. They claimed that Cohen’s proposed model was inadequate and that the data still supported the existence of the heuristic. “Judgment under Uncertainty” had a tremendous impact, not only on psychology and economics but also on the social sciences in general. The powerful demonstrations it offered profoundly changed the way practitioners in many fields approached decision-making. The impact and influence of Tversky and Kahneman’s work may be due to the fact that they continued to develop it.
