18.11: How Good—or Bad—are We?

In this chapter and the one before it, we encountered several biases that can lead to bad reasoning. There is some debate about just how bad people are at reasoning. The heuristics and biases approach that figured prominently in the previous chapter was developed by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in a series of papers beginning in the early 1970s, and many people have found this approach very promising. But in the last few years, some psychologists have argued that we are better at reasoning than some of this literature suggests.

Our performance depends, in part, on how we frame things. If we ask whether it is more probable that Linda is a bank teller or a bank teller and a leader in the feminist movement, we don’t do very well. If we rephrase the question in terms of frequencies, rather than probabilities, we do better. If we ask: are there more people fitting Linda’s profile who are bank tellers or who are bank tellers and leaders in the feminist movement, we give better answers. But while we may not be as bad at reasoning as some psychologists have suggested, it is clear that there is a lot of room for improvement.