Early studies of intuitive judgment and decision making conducted with the late Amos Tversky are reviewed in the context of two related concepts: an analysis of accessibility, the ease with which thoughts come to mind; a distinction between effortless intuition and deliberate reasoning. Intuitive thoughts, like percepts, are highly accessible. Determinants and consequences of accessibility help explain the central results of prospect theory, framing effects, the heuristic process of attribute substitution, and the characteristic biases that result from the substitution of nonextensional for extensional attributes. Variations in the accessibility of rules explain the occasional corrections of intuitive judgments. The study of biases is compatible with a view of intuitive thinking and decision making as generally skilled and successful.

This paper has two objectives. First, we will argue that the mutability of conceptual fea- tures can be represented as a single, multiple-valued dimension. We will show that the fea- tures of a concept can be reliably ordered with respect to the degree to which people are willing to transform the feature while retaining the integrity of a representation; i.e., that a number of conceptual tasks, all of which require people to transform conceptual features, produce similar orderings. Following Medin and Shoben (1988), these tasks have in common that they ask people to consider an object that is missing a feature but is otherwise intact (e.g., a real chair without a seat)

Research suggests that causal judgment is influenced primarily by counterfactual or covariational reasoning. In contrast, the author of this article develops judgment dissociation theory (JDT), which predicts that these types of reasoning differ in function and can lead to divergent judgments. The actuality principle proposes that causal selections focus on antecedents that are sufficient to generate the actual outcome. The substitution principle proposes that ad hoc categorization plays a key role in counterfactual and covariational reasoning such that counterfactual selections focus on antecedents that would have been sufficient to prevent the outcome or something like it and covariational selections focus on antecedents that yield the largest increase in the probability of the outcome or something like it. The findings of 4 experiments support JDT but not the competing counterfactual and covariational accounts. If causation is the cement of the universe, as the philosopher David Hume (1740/1938) put it, then it is fair to say that causal knowledge is the cement that binds together each person’s representational universe. Causal reasoning—the process that generates this glue—confers many functional advantages. In virtually every sphere of human interest, our abilities to learn and categorize

Perrow (1984) provides the following account of what he calls a “normal ” accident (see Figure 1): “On a beautiful night in October 1978, in the Chesapeake Bay, two vessels sighted one another visually and on radar. On one of them, the Cost Guard cutter training vessel Cuyahoga, the captain (a chief warrant officer) saw the other ship up ahead as a small object on the radar, and visually he saw two

The significance of counterfactual thinking in the causal judgment process has been emphasized for nearly two decades, yet no previous research has directly compared the relative effect of thinking counterfactually versus factually on causal judgment. Three experiments examined this comparison by manipulating the task frame used to focus participants’ thinking about a target event. Prior to making judgments about causality, preventability, blame, and control, participants were directed to think about a target actor either in counterfactual terms (what the actor could have done to change the outcome) or in factual terms (what the actor had done that led to the outcome). In each experiment, the effect of counterfactual thinking did not differ reliably from the effect of factual thinking on causal judgment. Implications for research on causal judgment and mental representation are discussed.

This paper outlines a framework for analyzing how decision makers achieve “situation awareness ” in complex, dynamic and uncertain situations. We use this framework to analyze a typical case of human “error ” in the command and control of a complex system. Our analysis shows that decision errors in this and other cases can be characterized as “normal ” (i.e., rational) consequences of the decision makers’ mental models. We conclude by suggesting that a mental models approach can provide unifying insights into the “heuristics and biases ” proposed by previous researchers. _____________________________________________________________________________________________ 1

Shut out all of your past except that which will help you weather your tomorrows. [Sir William Osler] How we evaluate a purchase depends not only on the characteristics of the products we buy but also on the characteristics of products we do not buy. Our satisfaction with a recently purchased car may be lower if we learn that other cars we considered received good evaluations from Car and Driver or Consumer Reports. If we fill up our car’s gas tank for $1.30 per gallon, we may feel upset if we subsequently see gas sold at $1.15 per gallon. We may even be displeased with our purchase of a stock that subsequently increased in value if other stocks we had considered buying increased more. In each of the above examples, we feel regret about the purchase we made. We feel that we made a bad deci-

Copyright # 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. The current experiment explored the effect of activating a counterfactual mind-set on the discussion of unique information and group judgment accuracy. Evidence suggests that a counterfactual mind-set is characterized by a focused, analytic mental state and, when activated at the group level, improves group judgment accuracy in the murder mystery paradigm (a hidden profile task). We hypothesized that the beneficial effect of the counterfactual mind-set would only help group problem-solving tasks if the mind-set had been activated at the group level, allowing the analytical mind-set to play out in an atmosphere of synergistic coordination. In contrast, if this highly focused mental state is activated at the individual level, it could impair group judgment quality because inwardly focused analytical individuals may fail to coordinate their behavior with other group members. Consistent with our hypothesis, activating a counterfactual mind-set at the individual level had a debilitating effect on the group judgment task, whereas activating a counterfactual mind-set at the group level had a facilitative

Acknowledgement. I wish to thank Jim Woodward and the editors for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. 2 1.

Democracy as a political form of social organization offers humanity its best prospect for freedom and peace. Today, it faces deliberate threats from totalitarian movements that rely on terrorist tactics. Democracy also faces threats from its own leaders because of the consequential nature of their judgment and decision making. This article examines how threats to democracy are perceived and managed. It is proposed that perception and management of threats to democracy represent a case of judgment and decision making under uncertainty. Relevant factors that influence policy decision making as it pertains to safeguarding democracies from threat are highlighted. There is a lot of talk these days about democracy, including the need to protect it from terrorists, to protect it from government policies that erode its fundamental commitments to civil liberties, humanitarian principles, and the rule of law, and to promote (or “spread”) it—even by use of force—to areas of the world where it currently does not exist. Indeed, foreign policy thinkers across the political spectrum share in common a penchant for promoting and protecting democracy,