Simple Heuristics in a Social World invites readers to discover the simple heuristics that people use to navigate the complexities and surprises of environments populated with others. The social world is a terrain where humans and other animals compete with conspecifics for myriad resources, including food, mates, and status, and where rivals grant the decision maker little time for deep thought, protracted information search, or complex calculations. Yet, the social world also en...

Psychologists, economists, historians, computer scientists, sociologists, philosophers, and legal scholars explore the conscious choice not to seek information.The history of intellectual thought abounds with claims that knowledge is valued and sought, yet individuals and groups often choose not to know. We call the conscious choice not to seek or use knowledge (or information) deliberate ignorance. When is this a virtue, when is it a vice, and what can be learned ...

**A call to rethink behavioral science that empowers people to steer themselves toward good choices.From an internationally acclaimed, multiple award-winning expert on decision making and a leading philosophical voice in behavioral public policy.**We all struggle to make good choices—what to eat, where to invest, when to get angry, whom to trust. For some time now, these struggles have been attributed to flaws in human reasoning: People are just not rational enough to do wh...

An examination of the cognitive tools that the mind uses to grapple with uncertainty in the real world.How do humans navigate uncertainty, continuously making near-effortless decisions and predictions even under conditions of imperfect knowledge, high complexity, and extreme time pressure? Taming Uncertainty argues that the human mind has developed tools to grapple with uncertainty. Unlike much previous scholarship in psychology and economics, this approach is root...

Critics of intelligence tests—writers such as Robert Sternberg, Howard Gardner, and Daniel Goleman—have argued in recent years that these tests neglect important qualities such as emotion, empathy, and interpersonal skills. However, such critiques imply that though intelligence tests may miss certain key noncognitive areas, they encompass most of what is important in the cognitive domain. In this book, Keith E. Stanovich challenges this widely held assumption.Stanovich shows that IQ tes...

Gerd Gigerenzer's influential work examines the rationality of individuals not from the perspective of logic or probability but from the point of view of adaptation to the real world of human behavior and interaction with the environment. Seen from this perspective human behavior is more rational than it might otherwise appear. This work is extremely influential and has spawned an entire research program. This volume collects recent articles looking at how people use "fast and frugal heuri...

Is our case strong enough to go to trial? Will interest rates go up? Can I trust this person? Such questions - and the judgments required to answer them - are woven into the fabric of everyday experience. This book, first published in 2002, examines how people make such judgments. The study of human judgment was transformed in the 1970s, when Kahneman and Tversky introduced their 'heuristics and biases' approach and challenged the dominance of strictly rational models. Their work highlight...

This book is a scholarly overview of the modern concepts, definitions, and theories of intellectual giftedness, and of past and current developments in the field of gifted education. The authors consider, in some detail, the roles of intelligence, creativity, and wisdom in giftedness and the interaction between culture and giftedness, as well as how giftedness can be understood in terms of a construct of developing expertise. The authors also review and discuss a set of key studies that ad...

This volume is a sequel to the landmark work that established an exciting new field of study, Stress, Appraisal and Coping (Lazarus and Folkman, 1984). The author now explores the newest trends in research and theory, focusing on the rationale for a cognitive-mediational approach to stress and emotions.He makes clear distinctions between social stress, physiological stress, and psychological stress. By integrating both stress and emotion into one theoretical framework, wit...

Language comprises a major mark of humans compared with other primates and is the main vehicle for social interaction. A major characteristic of any natural language is that the same communication, idea, or intention can be articulated in different ways—in other words, the same message can be "framed" differently. The same medical treatment can be portrayed in terms chance of chance of success or chance of failure; energy reduction can be expressed in terms of savings per day or savings pe...

How does motivation work? Scientific research shows that people are motivated to be effective in different ways that go beyond the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. In this text, E. Tory Higgins provides a new theory of motivation that argues that people are motivated by the pursuit of value, truth, and control, but the central story to motivation lies in how these elements work together.

In this bestselling textbook, contributors describe theories of normal human development advanced by such pioneers as Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud, Jean Piaget, Nancy Chodorow, Daniel Levinson, Erik Erikson, and Margaret Mahler. Beginning with infancy, toddlerhood, and preschool, each chapter examines corresponding ideologies concerning maturation and development in middle childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age, while acknowledging that no one theory can encompass all aspects of human...