How people actually decide, as opposed to how models assume they do.
12 topics · 23 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments
Justin Kruger & David Dunning · 1999
People who perform poorly on tests of grammar, logic and humour also lack the very skill needed to recognise their own poor performance, so they rate…
+4 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Availability: A Heuristic for Judging Frequency and Probability
Amos Tversky & Daniel Kahneman · 1973
People judge how likely or frequent an event is by how easily examples of it come to mind, a shortcut that tracks genuine frequency well enough to be…
+13 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Hindsight is Not Equal to Foresight: The Effect of Outcome Knowledge on Judgment Under Uncertainty
Baruch Fischhoff · 1975
Once people learn how an event turned out, they overestimate how predictable it was beforehand and often cannot accurately recall their own prior…
+3 more at this level
12 of 23 works
Justin Kruger & David Dunning
People who perform poorly on tests of grammar, logic and humour also lack the very skill needed to recognise their own poor performance, so they rate themselves as competent even as their scores place them near the bottom.
Daniel Kahneman
His Nobel lecture, arguing that intuitive judgement and choice are governed by an accessible, fast System 1 whose outputs a slower, effortful System 2 only occasionally checks or overrides.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Gerd Gigerenzer
Estimates that Americans who drove instead of flying out of dread of another attack caused more excess road deaths in the three months after September 11 than the terrorists killed in the attacks themselves, arguing that avoiding a dread risk is itself a risk that gets left out of the reckoning.
Barry Schwartz (TED)
Argues that added options raise expectations and regret rather than welfare; note that meta-analyses since have found the choice-overload effect close to zero on average and dependent on conditions.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Jack B. Soll, Katherine L. Milkman & John W. Payne
Sorts debiasing strategies into two families - changing the decision-maker's own habits of mind, or changing the environment they decide in - and argues the second is more reliable because it does not depend on remembering to think differently under pressure.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Amos Tversky & Daniel Kahneman
People judge how likely or frequent an event is by how easily examples of it come to mind, a shortcut that tracks genuine frequency well enough to be useful but is systematically thrown off by anything that makes an event memorable rather than common.
Amos Tversky & Daniel Kahneman
People estimate probability using a small set of mental shortcuts - representativeness, availability and anchoring - that are useful but produce systematic, predictable errors rather than random noise.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Charles G. Lord, Lee Ross & Mark R. Lepper
People who read the same mixed evidence on a contested topic each found it more convincing of their own prior view, so exposure to identical evidence drove opposing partisans further apart rather than together.
Amos Tversky & Daniel Kahneman
Using the 'Linda problem', shows people routinely judge a detailed, representative scenario as more probable than a broader category that logically includes it, evidence that representativeness can override the basic conjunction rule of probability even among statistically sophisticated participants.
Paul Slovic
Lay judgements of how risky an activity or technology is track dread and unfamiliarity far more than statistical death tolls, which is why nuclear power has historically been feared out of proportion to its measured harm.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Norbert Schwarz et al.
People judge frequency not just from what comes to mind but from how easily it comes to mind, so asking someone to recall many examples of their own assertiveness can make them rate themselves as less assertive than asking for only a few.
Raymond S. Nickerson
Surveys confirmation bias across memory, reasoning and hypothesis testing and argues it is not one narrow effect but a family of related tendencies to notice, seek and weight evidence that fits a prior belief more than evidence against it.
link checked 17 Sept 2026This subject genuinely sits in more than one domain. These fields approach the same ground with different methods.