Do Judgmental Researchers Use their Own Research? A Review of Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases

Abstract

Assume the following problem: you must select a set of k items from a population of N, where the boundaries of N are ill-defined and no census of the population is available. How should you proceed? According to the research in Judgment Under Uncertainty (JUU), decision-makers are prone to numerous errors in such tasks.

More specifically, the problem Kahneman, Slovic, and Tversky (KST) faced was to select, from a large number of existing papers, those that would be most useful to their potential audience. As nearly as I can tell, they made their selections by unaided intuition. As a result, the book suffers from the very problems that the book discusses (e.g., anchoring, availability and representativeness).