Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases
Tversky and Kahneman's 1974 paper set out three heuristics people use when judging probability and quantity under uncertainty: representativeness, availability, and anchoring and adjustment. Anchoring is the one this vault cites most often. Their demonstration was deliberately absurd: a wheel of fortune, rigged to stop at ten or sixty-five, was spun in front of students at the University of Oregon before they estimated what percentage of countries in the United Nations were African. Estimates averaged twenty-five per cent after the low number and forty-five after the high one, although everyone had watched the wheel produce it. The paper's larger claim is that these shortcuts are generally useful and produce severe and predictable errors in specific circumstances, which is the sentence the popular literature usually drops.
Tversky and Kahneman's 1974 paper set out three heuristics people use when judging probability and quantity under uncertainty: representativeness, availability, and anchoring and adjustment. Anchoring is the one this vault cites most often. Their demonstration was deliberately absurd: a wheel of fortune, rigged to stop at ten or sixty-five, was spun in front of students at the University of Oregon before they estimated what percentage of countries in the United Nations were African. Estimates averaged twenty-five per cent after the low number and forty-five after the high one, although everyone had watched the wheel produce it. The paper's larger claim is that these shortcuts are generally useful and produce severe and predictable errors in specific circumstances, which is the sentence the popular literature usually drops.
Written from the public record for the paper.
What our sources record
Reproduced as it was written when this source was checked, figures and all.
Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). 'Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases.' Science, 185(4157), 1124-1131. The wheel of fortune demonstration; mean estimates of 25 per cent and 45 per cent against anchors of 10 and 65. doi:10.1126/science.185.4157.1124
Where we use it
- Why the First Price You See Decides What You Pay, Why We Act
Reliability of this reference
The link below was matched against the publisher's record on title, first author and year, and all three agree.
The source
https://doi.org/10.1126/science.185.4157.1124
DOI: 10.1126/science.185.4157.1124