Real Life Comes in Shades of Gray

• Published in: PsycCritiques Vol. 55; no. 17; p. No Pagination Specified
• Main Author: Thomas, Jay C.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: American Psychological Association 28.04.2010
• Subjects: Cognitive Bias; Decision Making; Human
• ISSN: 1554-0138; 1554-0138
• DOI: 10.1037/a0019209

Reviews the book, Streetlights and shadows: Searching for the keys to adaptive decision making by Gary Klein (see record 2009-07530-000). The author organizes this book around 10 assumptions most of us make on a routine basis. For example, Number 1 is “teaching people procedures helps them perform tasks more skillfully,” and Number 2 is “decision biases distort our thinking” (both p. 8). Procedures can be helpful, but considerable research demonstrates that experts discard them when the situation dictates a need to do so. Decision biases, among them anchoring, representativeness, and framing, do have life as heuristics and reflect inherent limitations in our cognitive abilities, but they usually serve to make for better decisions than we would make without them, not worse ones (see Gigerenzer, 2008, for a discussion of the evolutionary significance of the use of heuristics). This book is the most recent of a developing genre that challenges psychologists to reflect on what they think they know, believe, and do. If this work is taken seriously, then within a few years psychology as we know it will change to a much stronger, more relevant field of study and application. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)