Daniel Kahneman Nobel Lecture

483

ligence or sophistication to manifest itself. When cues are abundant, at the

other extreme, even the moderately intelligent will find them (Kahneman,

2000a; Stanovich & West, 1999, 2002).

The model suggests four ways in which a judgment or choice may be made: 

(i) no intuitive response comes to mind, and the judgment is produced by

System 2. 

(ii) an intuitive judgment or intention is evoked, and

a. is endorsed by System 2; 

b. serves as an anchor for adjustments that respond to other features of

the situation; 

c. is identified as incompatible with a subjectively valid rule, and blocked

from overt expression. 

There is of course no way to ascertain precisely the relative frequencies of

these outcomes, but casual observation suggests the following ordering, from

most to least frequent: 

(iia) – (iib) – (i) – (iic)

Most behavior is intuitive, skilled, unproblematic and successful (Klein,

1998). In some fraction of cases, a need to correct the intuitive judgments

and preferences will be acknowledged, but the intuitive impression will be the

anchor for the judgment. Under-correction is more likely than over-correc-

tion in such cases. A conservative general prediction is that variables that are

neglected in intuition will remain underweighted in considered judgments. 

The analysis of intuitive thinking and choice that has been presented here

provides a framework which highlights commonalities between lines of re-

search that are usually studied separately. In particular, the psychology of

judgment and the psychology of choice share their basic principles, and dif-

fer mainly in content. At a more specific level, prototype heuristics solve

structurally similar problems in diverse domains, where they yield closely 

similar patterns of results. Furthermore, the principles are not specific to the

domain of judgment / decision making. The analogy between intuition and

perception has been especially fruitful in identifying the ways in which in-

tuitive thought differs from deliberate reasoning, and the notions of accessi-

bility and dual-process analyses play a fundamental role in several domains of

social and cognitive psychology.

A general framework such as the one offered here is not a substitute for do-

main-specific concepts and theories. For one thing, general frameworks and

specific models make different ideas accessible. Novel ideas and compelling

examples are perhaps more likely to arise from thinking about problems at a

lower level of abstraction and generality. However, a broad framework can be

useful if it guides a principled search for analogies across domains, to identi-

fy common processes and to prevent overly narrow interpretations of find-

ings.

---

484

REFERENCES

Agnoli, F. (1991). Development of judgmental heuristics and logical reasoning: Training

counteracts the representativeness heuristic. Cognitive Development, 6, 195–217.

Agnoli, F., & Krantz, D. H. (1989). Suppressing natural heuristics by formal instruction:

The case of the conjunction fallacy. Cognitive Psychology, 21, 515–550.

Anderson, N. H. (1981). Foundations of information integration theory. New York: Academic

Press.

Anderson, N. H. (1991a). Contributions to information integration theory (Vol. I: Cognition).

Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Anderson, N. H. (1991b). Contributions to information integration theory (Vol. II: Social).

Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Anderson, N. H. (1996). A functional theory of cognition. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Ariely, D. (1998). Combining experiences over time: The effects of duration, intensity

changes, and on-line measurements on retrospective pain evaluations. Journal of

Behavioral Decision Making, 11, 19–45.

Ariely, D. (2001). Seeing sets: Representation by statistical properties. Psychological Science,

12, 157–162.

Ariely, D., & Loewenstein, G. (2000). When does duration matter in judgment and decision

making? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 129, 524–529.

Arrow, K. J. (1982). Risk perception in psychology and economics. Economic Inquiry, 20, 1–9.

Bar-Hillel, M., & Neter, E. (2002). How alike is it versus how likely is it: A disjunction falla-

cy in probability judgments. In T. Gilovich, D. Griffin & D. Kahneman (Eds.), Heuristics

and Biases (pp.82–97). New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 82–97.

Bargh, J. A. (1997). The automaticity of everyday life. In R. S. Wyer, Jr. (Ed.), The auto-

maticity of everyday life: Advances in social cognition (Vol. 10, pp.1–61). Mahwah, NJ:

Erlbaum. 

Bernoulli, D. (1954). Exposition of a new theory on the measurement of risk, Econometrica,

22, 23–36. (Original work published 1738).

Bless, H., Clore, G. L., Schwarz, N., Golisano, V., Rabe, C., & Wolk, M. (1996). Mood and

the use of scripts: Does a happy mood really lead to mindlessness? Journal of Personality

and Social Psychology, 71, 665–679.

Bodenhausen, G. V. (1990). Stereotypes as judgmental heuristics: Evidence of circadian

variations in discrimination. Psychological Science, 1, 319–322.

Brenner, L. A., Koehler, D. J., & Rottenstreich, Y. (2002). Remarks on support theory:

Recent advances and future directions. In T. Gilovich, D. Griffin & D. Kahneman (Eds.),

Heuristics and Biases (pp. 489–509). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Cacioppo, J. T., Priester, J. R., & Berntson, G. G. (1993). Rudimentary determinants of at-

titudes. II: Arm flexion and extension have differential effects on attitudes. Journal of

Personality and Social Psychology, 65, 5–17.

Chaiken, S., & Trope, Y. (Eds.). (1999). Dual-process theories in social psychology. New York:

Guilford Press.

Chapman, G. B., & Johnson, E. J. (2002). Incorporating the irrelevant: Anchors in judg-

ments of belief and value. In T. Gilovich, D. Griffin & D. Kahneman (Eds.), Heuristics and

biases (pp.120–138). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Chong, S. C., & Treisman, A. (2003). Representation of statistical properties. Vision

Research, in press.

Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (1996). Are humans good intuitive statisticians after all?

Rethinking some conclusions from the literature on judgment and uncertainty.

Cognition, 58, 1–73.

Desvousges, W. H., Johnson, F., Dunford, R., Hudson, S., Wilson, K., & Boyle, K. (1993).

Measuring natural resource damages with contingent valuation: Tests of validity and re-

liability. In J. A. Hausman (Ed.), Contingent valuation: A critical assessment (pp. 91–159).

Amsterdam: North Holland. 

---