How Experimental Methods Shaped Views on Human Competence and Rationality

Within just 7 years, behavioral decision research in psychology underwent a dramatic change: In 1967, Peterson and Beach (1967) reviewed more than 160 experiments concerned with people’s statistical intuitions. Invoking the metaphor of the mind as an intuitive statistician, they concluded that “probability theory and statistics can be used as the basis for psychological models that integrate and account for human performance in a wide range of inferential tasks” (p. 29).

Yet in a 1974 Science article, Tversky and Kahneman rejected this conclusion, arguing that “people rely on a limited number of heuristic principles which reduce the complex tasks of assessing probabilities and predicting values to simple judgmental operations” (p. 1124). With that, they introduced the heuristics-and-biases research program, which has profoundly influenced how psychology, and the behavioral sciences more generally, view the mind’s competences and rationality.

How was this radical transformation possible? We examine a previously neglected driver: The heuristics-and-biases program established an experimental protocol in behavioral decision research that relied on described scenarios rather than learning and experience.

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