Abstract

Research on judgment and choice has been dominated by functionalist assumptions that depict people as either intuitive scientists animated by epistemic goals or intuitive economists animated by utilitarian ones. This article identifies 3 alternative social functionalist starting points for inquiry: people as pragmatic politicians trying to cope with accountability demands from key constituencies in their lives, principled theologians trying to protect sacred values from secular encroachments, and prudent prosecutors trying to enforce social norms. Each functionalist framework stimulates middle-range theories that specify (a) cognitive–affective–behavioral strategies of coping with adaptive challenges and (b) the implications of these coping strategies for identifying empirical and normative boundary conditions on judgmental tendencies classified as errors or biases within the dominant research programs. Once an esoteric specialty of a small cadre of cognitive psychologists, experimental research on judgment and choice has—to judge just by citation counts—become psychology’s leading intellectual export to the social sciences as well as to a host of applied fields. The influence of this research program has spread (critics might say “metastasized”) into such diverse domains as

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