p.48-49 In psychology, a conceptual framework has been developed
to deal with our judgments and expectations concerning events and outcomes of possible courses of action... The framework,
called the lens model... gets its name from the notion that we cannot make direct contact
with the objects and events in the world outside our sense organs, but only perceive them indirectly through a "lens" of information
that mediates between the external objects and our internal perceptions... The framework forces us to recognize that
a complete theory of judgment must include a representation of the environment in which the behavior occurs. We refer to it
as a framework because it is not a theory that describes the details of the judgment process, but rather it places the parts
of the judgment situation in a conceptual template that is useful by itself and can be subjected to further theoretical analysis.
p.55 Historically, some of the earliest psychological research on judgment
addressed the question of whether trained experts' predictions were better than statistically derived weighted averages of
the relevant predictors... In 1954, Paul Meehl published a highly influential book in which he reviewed approximately 20 such
studies comparing the clinical judgments of people (expert psychologists and psychiatrists in his study) with the linear statistical
model based on only relationships in the empirical data on the events of interest... In all studies, the statistical method
provided more accurate predictions, or the two methods tied.
p.58,61 Why is it that linear models predict better than clinical experts? ...The psychological
principle that might explain the predictive success of linear models is that people have a great deal of difficulty
in attending to two or more noncomparable aspects of a stimulus at once.
p.63 We believe, however, that a substantial amount of time and other resources
is squandered on expert judgments that could be made more equitably, more efficiently, and more accurately by the statistical
models we humans construct than by we humans alone... Research by one of us (Dawes) shows that it is not even necessary to
use statistically optimal weights in linear models for them to outperform experts.
p.114-115 What our minds do seem to work by is a basic sense of similarity... What is representative
judgment? The English empiricists such as John Locke (1632-1704) maintained that thinking consists of the association
of ideas... the basic thesis that thought is primarily an associative process has gained wide acceptance.
p.193 Third, and most helpful, we recommend the use of diagrams to represent the to-be-judged situation
and to guide information search, inferences, and calculations. (We rely heavily on Gerd Gigerenzer and his colleague
Peter Sedlmeier's experiments with various representational systems; a tutorial in their "BasicBayes" method is available
in Sedlmeier, 1997.)
p.217 [quoting Kahneman and Tversky, 1979] Our perceptual apparatus is attuned to the evaluation
of changes or differences rather than to the evaluation of absolute magnitudes. When we respond to attributes such
as brightness, loudness, or temperature, the past and present context of experience defines an adaptation level, or reference
point, and stimuli are perceived in relation to this reference point.
p.249 Some experts have defined rationality as compatibility between choice and value: Rational
behavior is behavior that maximizes the value of consequences.
