What does the work of Kahneman & Tversky (1974) tell us about thinking & reasoning?

Work of Kahneman & Tversky (1974) tell us about thinking & reasoning?

The endeavour to understand human reason is perhaps one of the oldest pursuits known to man and indeed many have described this desire as being at the core of what makes us human. Although this area was originally the playing field of philosophers - such as Aristotle, Hobbes, Descartes, Hume and Kant, to name but a few - their insights laid the foundation for the transition of the field to the more scientific endeavour of cognitive psychology. Traditional theories may have focussed on more normative aspects of directed thinking, intended to identify practical strategies through logic and systematic argument, however modern cognitive theories attempt to understand the underlying psychological processes of thought and its dynamic effects on our judgment and behaviour (Sternberg, 2005).

When faced with judgment in a problem-solving situation, the human brain relies on a multitude of complex strategies. The most influential work in problem-solving cognition was perhaps that of the Gestalt psychologists in the early twentieth century (King et. al, 1994). Researchers such as Wertheimer, Duncker and Luchins published compelling research about the structure and dynamics of problem-solving strategies, forming the basis for recent theories such as Piaget's Cognitive Development and Bandura's Social Cognitive Theory (King et. al, 1994). Modern pioneers call for a multi-faceted approach to understanding cognition, eager to merge known cognitive processes (e.g. deductive/inductive inference, symbolic and analogical representation, abstract reasoning, algorithmic logic and pattern detection) into one unified theory (e.g. Newell, 1990).

Whilst it may be easier to make good judgments if privy to all pertinent information or given hours for directed research, many of the decisions we make in every-day life are made bereft of such advantages. When faced with a knowledge-poor situation or under constraints of time or uncertainty, we instead depend on 'rules of thumb' or cognitive heuristics (Gleitman et. al, 2004; Tversky & Kahneman, 1983). In a series of papers in the 1970's, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman 'reshaped the psychology of human judgment' by proposing that instead of dependency on complex systems, we in fact only use a limited number of simple cognitive heuristics when presented with limited 'outside' information (Hollyoak & Morrison, 2005). For instance, they suggested that people judge likelihood of events based on how it 'represents' a larger group or other similar examples - a phenomena they coined the representativeness heuristic (Tversky & Kahnmeman, 1972). As well as being backed by a wealth of empirical research (Sherman & Corty, 1984 for review), this idea fits well with accepted models of learning theory, namely that we tend to categorise things in the memory and store things by association (Sternberg, 2006) and are prone to effects such as stereotyping (Gleitman et. al, 2004)

Another heuristic demonstrated by Tversky and Kahneman is the availability heuristic (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973). This heuristic is based on the idea that when asked to judge frequency or probability of an event, ...