The Intuitive Statistician Lives: How a Change in Methods Shifted Our View on Human Judgment
How accurate are people’s statistical intuitions? Attempts to answer this question gave rise to the field of judgment and decision-making. The early view was that human judgment could be approximated by probability theory and statistics. This view of man as an intuitive statistician was quickly replaced the Kahneman’s and Tversky’s finding, that people’s judgments follow heuristics that sometimes lead to biases. This new view became prevalent and was later underpinned by the award of two Nobel prizes to Kahneman and Thaler. However, the discrepancy between the diverging views was left unexplained. Why do people’s judgments align with probability theory—as seen by Edwards, Peterson, and Beach—and yet prone to error—as seen by Kahneman and Tversky? These questions remained unresolved. Examining the research methods used since the sixties, we try to unearth an explanation for this puzzling discrepancy.