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The psychologist Anne Treisman dedicated her career to the study of attention and perception, a central concern of cognitive science. While still a graduate student, she modified and reformulated the leading theory of auditory attention. Her discoveries and insights into the role of visual attention in the perception of objects, to which she devoted her subsequent decades of research, have had a lasting influence, not only in experimental psychology but also in vision research, neuroscience and artificial intelligence. In a period of rising interest in the brain, her foundational theories inspired thousands of experiments in her own field and others, and the originality and precision of her experimental design confirmed the continued relevance of behavioural research to the scientific enterprise. Treisman's accomplishments were recognized by the National Academy of Sciences in the USA in 1994 and by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1995. In 1996, she became the first psychologist to win the Golden Brain Award. She received the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Psychology in 2009, and was awarded the National Medal of Science by President Barack Obama at a White House ceremony in 2013.

Reports in the 1970s of cognitive illusions in judgments of uncertainty had been anticipated by Laplace 150 years earlier. We discuss Miller and Gelman’s remark that Laplace’s anticipation of the main ideas of the heuristics and biases approach “gives us a new perspective on these ideas as more universal and less contingent on particular developments [that came much] later.”

The chapter develops the theme that the concept of perceptual object and the rules of grouping and organization are essential to describe the abilities and limitations of selective attention. Attention can only be directed to preattentively defined perceptual objects, and it facilitates all the responses associated with properties or elements of the selected object. Evidence is presented from studies of the Stroop task, effects of visual grouping on recall, search and selective attention in tachistoscopic displays, and the visual and auditory suffix effects. A theoretical analysis of perceptual objects is outlined, in which perceptual identity is distinguished from the process of identification.

What is the origin and nature of consciousness? If consciousness is common to humans and animals alike, what are the defining traits of human consciousness? Moderated by Steve Paulson, executive producer and host of To the Best of Our Knowledge, Nobel laureate psychologist Daniel Kahneman, philosopher David Chalmers, expert in primate cognition Laurie Santos, and physician-scientist Nicholas Schiff discuss what it means to be conscious and examine the human capacities displayed in cognitive, aesthetic, and ethical behaviors, with a focus on the place and function of the mind within nature. The following is an edited transcript of the discussion that occurred October 10, 2012, 7:00-8:15 PM, at the New York Academy of Sciences in New York City.

Intense pain is often exaggerated in retrospective evaluations, indicating a possible divergence between experience and memory. However, little is known regarding how people retrospectively evaluate experiences with both pleasant and unpleasant aspects. The Day Reconstruction Method (DRM; Kahneman. Krueger, Schkade, Schwarz, & Stone, 2004b) provides a unique opportunity to examine memory-experience gaps in recollections of individual days, which elicit a wide gamut of emotions. We asked female participants (N = 810, Study 1, and N = 615, Study 2) to reconstruct episodes of the previous day using the DRM and demonstrated that memory and experience diverge for both pleasant and unpleasant emotions. When they rated their day overall in a retrospectively evaluative frame of mind, the participants recalled more unpleasant and pleasant emotions than they reported feeling during the individual episodes, with a larger gap for unpleasant emotions than for pleasant emotions. The findings suggest that separate processes are used for committing positive and negative events to memory and that, especially when unpleasant emotions are involved, prudence is favored over accuracy.

Social scientists and policymakers have long been interested in comparing the subjectivewell-being (SWB) of populations over time and across countries, although SWB is hard todefine and measure. Nevertheless, attempts have been made to rank countries based onSWB (e.g., Veenhoven 1996; OECD 2005). Cross-country data have also been used tostudy the effect on SWB of public policies, economic conditions and institutions (e.g.,Alesina et al. 2002; Frey and Stutzer 2002; Blanchflower 2007). The most commonmeasure of SWB in these studies is based on a question that asks respondents about theiroverall level of life satisfaction or happiness. Other measures of SWB include ecologicalmomentary assessment (EMA; Stone et al. 1999) and the day reconstruction method(DRM; Kahneman et al. 2004). These measures collect individuals’ time use and affectiveexperience over time, either using real-time data collection or diary recall methods. Anadvantage of such time-based SWB data is that they connect individuals’ reported SWB toactual events that occurred in their lives, but these measures have not been used previouslyin cross-country studies.

Direct reports of subjective well-being may have a useful role in the measurement of consumer preferences and social welfare, if they can be done in a credible way. Can well-being be measured by a subjective survey, even approximately? In this paper, we discuss research on how individuals' responses to subjective well-being questions vary with their circumstances and other factors. We will argue that it is fruitful to distinguish among different conceptions of utility rather than presume to measure a single, unifying concept that motivates all human choices and registers all relevant feelings and experiences. While various measures of well-being are useful for some purposes, it is important to recognize that subjective well-being measures features of individuals' perceptions of their experiences, not their utility as economists typically conceive of it. Those perceptions are a more accurate gauge of actual feelings if they are reported closer to the time of, and in direct reference to, the actual experience. We conclude by proposing the U-index, a misery index of sorts, which measures the proportion of time that people spend in an unpleasant state, and has the virtue of not requiring a cardinal conception of individuals' feelings.

This paper explores the possibility of basing economic appraisal on the measurement of experienced utility (utility as hedonic experience) rather than decision utility (utility as a representation of preference). Because of underestimation of the extent of hedonic adaptation to changed circumstances and because of the “focusing illusion” (exaggerating the importance of the current focus of one’s attention), individuals’ forecasts of experienced utility are subject to systematic error. Such errors induce preference anomalies which the experienced utility approach might circumvent. The “day reconstruction method” of measuring experienced utility is considered as a possible alternative to stated preference methods.

Economists have traditionally eschewed direct measures of well-being on methodological grounds: the private nature of experience and the discomfort of making interpersonal comparisons. Instead, income is often used as a proxy for opportunities and well-being. If people are not fully rational, however, their choices will not necessarily maximize their experienced utility, and increasing their opportunities will not necessarily make them better off (Kahneman, 1994; Cass R. Sunstein and Richard Thaler, 2004). Direct measures of experienced utility become particularly relevant in a context of bounded rationality. Furthermore, advances in psychology and neuroscience suggest that experienced utility and well-being can be measured with some accuracy (Kahneman et al., 1999). Robust and interpersonally consistent relationships have been observed between subjective measures of experience and both specific measures of brain function and health outcomes. In part because of these findings, economic research using subjective indicators of happiness and life satisfaction has proliferated in recent years (see Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer [2002] for a survey). Most work on well-being uses a question on overall life satisfaction or happiness. We suggest an alternative route based on time budgets and affective ratings of experiences.

Large samples of students in the Midwest and in Southern California rated satisfaction with life overall as well as with various aspects of life, for either themselves or someone similar to themselves in one of the two regions. Self-reported overall life satisfaction was the same in both regions, but participants who rated a similar other expected Californians to be more satisfied than Midwesterners. Climate-related aspects were rated as more important for someone living in another region than for someone in one's own region. Mediation analyses showed that satisfaction with climate and with cultural opportunities accounted for the higher overall life satisfaction predicted for Californians. Judgments of life satisfaction in a different location are susceptible to a focusing illusion: Easily observed and distinctive differences between locations are given more weight in such judgments than they will have in reality.

Different interpretations of an apparent temporal pattern to the experience of regret were addressed through joint research. T. Gilovich and V. H. Medvec (1995a) argued that people regret actions more in the short term and inactions more in the long run because the sting of regrettable action diminishes relatively quickly, whereas the pain of regrettable inaction lingers longer. D. Kahneman (1995) disagreed, arguing that people's long-term regrets of inaction are largely wistful and therefore not terribly troublesome. Three studies that examined the emotional profile of action and inaction regrets established considerable common ground. Action regrets were found to elicit primarily "hot" emotions (e.g., anger), and inaction regrets were found to elicit both feelings of wistfulness (e.g., nostalgia) and despair (e.g., misery). Thus, some inaction regrets are indeed wistful (as Kahneman argued), whereas others are troublesome (as Gilovich and Medvec maintained).

An experimental study of punitive damage awards in personal injury cases was conducted, using jury-eligible respondents. There was substantial consensus on judgments of the outrageousness of a defendant's actions and of the appropriate severity of punishment. Judgments of dollar awards made by individuals and synthetic juries were much more erratic. These results are familiar characteristics of judgments made on unbounded magnitude scales. The degree of harm suffered by the plaintiff and the size of the firm had a pronounced effect on awards. Some judgmental tasks are far easier than others for juries to perform, and reform possibilities should exploit this fact.

Presents an obituary for Richard Michael Suzman, who died on April 16, 2015. Suzman was trained as a sociologist and anthropologist, but he was attracted to the approaches of demography and economics. He came to know a great deal about diverse fields of science, including health, physiology, psychology, genetics, and economics. He was a scientific leader who was on a quest to develop new transdisciplinary fields and to mobilize the best scientists to work in them. Suzman's passion for transdisciplinary science was fully expressed in his greatest achievement: the famous Health and Retirement Survey (HRS), which he initiated in 1988 and continued to guide and inspire. (PsycINFO Database Record

Decision makers have a strong tendency to consider problems as unique. They isolate the current choice from future opportunities and neglect the statistics of the past in evaluating current plans. Overly cautious attitudes to risk result from a failure to appreciate the effects of statistical aggregation in mitigating relative risk. Overly optimistic forecasts result from the adoption of an inside view of the problem, which anchors predictions on plans and scenarios. The conflicting biases are documented in psychological research. Possible implications for decision making in organizations are examined.

Measurement of affective states in everyday life is of fundamental importance in many types of quality of life, health, and psychological research. Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) is the recognized method of choice, but the respondent burden can be high. The day reconstruction method (DRM) was developed by Kahneman and colleagues (Science, 2004, 306, 1776-1780) to assess affect, activities and time use in everyday life. We sought to validate DRM affect ratings by comparison with contemporaneous EMA ratings in a sample of 94 working women monitored over work and leisure days. Six EMA ratings of happiness, tiredness, stress, and anger/frustration were obtained over each 24 h period, and were compared with DRM ratings for the same hour, recorded retrospectively at the end of the day. Similar profiles of affect intensity were recorded with the two techniques. The between-person correlations adjusted for attenuation ranged from 0.58 (stress, working day) to 0.90 (happiness, leisure day). The strength of associations was not related to age, educational attainment, or depressed mood. We conclude that the DRM provides reasonably reliable estimates both of the intensity of affect and variations in affect over the day, so is a valuable instrument for the measurement of everyday experience in health and social research.

Loss aversion in choice is commonly assumed to arise from the anticipation that losses have a greater effect on feelings than gains, but evidence for this assumption in research on judged feelings is mixed. We argue that loss aversion is present in judged feelings when people compare gains and losses and assess them on a common scale. But many situations in which people judge and express their feelings lack these features. When judging their feelings about an outcome, people naturally consider a context of similar outcomes for comparison (e.g., they consider losses against other losses). This process permits gains and losses to be normed separately and produces psychological scale units that may not be the same in size or meaning for gains and losses. Our experiments show loss aversion in judged feelings for tasks that encourage gain-loss comparisons, but not tasks that discourage them, particularly those using bipolar scales.

Evidence is presented that measures of subjective well-being vary along a dimension anchored at the two ends by evaluative judgments of life and experienced affect. A debate in recent decades has been focused on whether rising income increases the experience of well-being. This chapter found that Judgment is more strongly associated with income, and with long-term changes of national income. Measures of feelings showed lower correlations with income in cross-sectional analyses, and lower associations with long-term rising income. Furthermore, income showed very similar regression lines with the judgment of life at the two times of the surveys, suggesting that a common standard was used. Measures of concepts such as “Happiness” and “Life Satisfaction” appear to be saturated with varying mixtures of judgment and affect, and this is reflected in the degree to which they correlate with income. This chapter's findings are relevant to Easterlin’s hypotheses about income and well-being. Income and income change were associated with judgments of life and national increases in them, whereas the associations of income and feelings were less robust.

A study using the Day Reconstruction Method (DRM) was carried out to examine the determinants of two aspects of well-being: experienced happiness and life satisfaction. Participants were 770 women in Columbus, Ohio and 700 women in Rennes, France. Results are generally similar in the two cities. Life satisfaction reflects the global circumstances of the individual’s life (marital status, income), but happiness reflects the hedonic value of the activities and social interactions to which she allocates her time. The circumstances of a satisfying life have hedonic costs as well as benefits and are associated more consistently with activation/arousal than with happiness. The complex hedonic effects of life circumstances suggest an alternative interpretation of the hedonic treadmill.

Publisher Summary Proponents of the Chicago school of thought perceive the human agent as completely rational. In their seminal article “A theory of rational addiction,” Becker and Murphy present a human agent who anticipates everything and chooses between two options as a function of their derived utility. The agent, in principle, knows he is going to become addicted because he is discounting the future, and discounting the future at the interest rate. There is a fundamental difference between the economic analysis—or the Chicago economic analysis—and what most psychologists feel to be the case. Psychologists and economists adopt very different perspectives of the mainsprings of behavior and decisions. Psychologists tend to take a retrospective view of the consequences of action. For example, looking at someone who began smoking at a young age, and suffering and regretting it later, psychologists would say that it was not worth it. This retrospective view of the whole arc stretches from the decision to the consequences. An economist's perspective is solely based on the point of decision. Theirs is a forward-looking perspective.

Intuitions relating to outcomes extended over time are examined. Utility integration is proposed as a normative rule for the evaluation of extended episodes. In Experiment 1, subjects explicitly compared aversive experiences of varying durations. By several measures, disutility was a marginally decreasing function of episode duration, even for experiences that were thought to become increasingly aversive. This pattern is a qualitative violation of the integration rule. In Experiment 2, subjects made global evaluations of a hypothetical person's aversive experiences, on the basis of a series of subjective ratings of discomfort made at periodic intervals. The results showed an extreme sensitivity to improving or deteriorating trend and a striking neglect of duration. The final moments of an extended episode appear to exert a strong influence on the overall judgment. This leads to violations of monotonicity when adding some moments of moderate pain reduces judgments of global aversiveness.

A distinction is made between decision utility, experienced utility, and predicted utility and an experiment is reported addressing people's ability to forecast experienced utility. Subjects in two experiments made predictions of their future liking for stimuli to which they were then exposed daily for one week. The stimuli were ice cream in a pilot study, plain yogurt in the main study, and short musical pieces in both studies. Decreased liking was the modal prediction, even when the true outcome was increased liking, or reduced dislike. There was substantial stability of tastes, but there were also substantial individual differences in the size and even the sign of changes in liking with repeated exposure. There was little or no correlation between the predictions of hedonic change that individuals made and the changes they actually experienced.

The article reviews theoretical analyses and some recent evidence on the role of reference points and anchors in individual choice, and considers possible implications of these analyses for a treatment of negotiation. Reference points are characterized by the abrupt changes in the valuation of gains and losses and of acceptable or reprehensible behavior. Norm theory is applied to the treatment of mixed feelings about outcomes to which multiple reference points are relevant. Anchoring effects in judgment are analyzed in terms of a memory process that assigns normality to possible values.

This article reports on an effort to explore the differences between two approaches to intuition and expertise that are often viewed as conflicting: heuristics and biases (HB) and naturalistic decision making (NDM). Starting from the obvious fact that professional intuition is sometimes marvelous and sometimes flawed, the authors attempt to map the boundary conditions that separate true intuitive skill from overconfident and biased impressions. They conclude that evaluating the likely quality of an intuitive judgment requires an assessment of the predictability of the environment in which the judgment is made and of the individual's opportunity to learn the regularities of that environment. Subjective experience is not a reliable indicator of judgment accuracy.

Findings are presented indicating that measures of subjective well-being can be ordered along a dimension varying from evaluative judgments of life at one end to experienced affect at the other. A debate in recent decades has focused on whether increasing income raises the experience of well-being. We found that judgment measures are more strongly associated with income and with the long-term changes of national income. Measures of affect showed lower correlations with income in cross-sectional analyses, as well as lower associations with long-term rising income. Measures of concepts such as “Happiness” and “Life Satisfaction” appear to be saturated with varying mixtures of judgment and affect, and this is reflected in the degree to which they correlate with income. The results indicate that measures of well-being fall along one dimension with different factors influencing scores at each end. Both types of well-being, judgment and affect, show very similar patterns of declining marginal utility with increasing income.

A wine-loving economist we know purchased some nice Bordeaux wines years ago at low prices. The wines have greatly appreciated in value, so that a bottle that cost only $10 when purchased would now fetch $200 at auction. This economist now drinks some of this wine occasionally, but would neither be willing to sell the wine at the auction price nor buy an additional bottle at that price. Thaler (1980) called this pattern—the fact that people often demand much more to give up an object than they would be willing to pay to acquire it—the endowment effect. The example also illustrates what Samuelson and Zeckhauser (1988) call a status quo bias, a preference for the current state that biases the economist against both buying and selling his wine. These anomalies are a manifestation of an asymmetry of value that Kahneman and Tversky (1984) call loss aversion—the disutility of giving up an object is greater that the utility associated with acquiring it. This column documents the evidence supporting endowment effects and status quo biases, and discusses their relation to loss aversion.

Publisher Summary The early empirical evidence of a wide disparity between people's valuations of gains and losses appeared in results of contingent valuation studies in which respondents were asked both how much they would be willing to pay to prevent a loss of an environmental or other amenity, and what sum they would demand to accept its loss. The results of experiments testing people's valuations of gains and losses have been consistent in showing that individuals value losses far more than otherwise fully commensurate gains. This leads to smaller gains from trade and fewer voluntary market transactions than would be the case with valuation equivalence. The valuation disparity also suggests greater caution in assessing welfare losses, predicting market outcomes, and may well imply different policy designs.

Studies of subjective well-being have conventionally relied upon self-report, which directs subjects' attention to their emotional experiences. This method presumes that attention itself does not influence emotional processes, which could bias sampling. We tested whether attention influences experienced utility (the moment-by-moment experience of pleasure) by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure the activity of brain systems thought to represent hedonic value while manipulating attentional load. Subjects received appetitive or aversive solutions orally while alternatively executing a low or high attentional load task. Brain regions associated with hedonic processing, including the ventral striatum, showed a response to both juice and quinine. This response decreased during the high-load task relative to the low-load task. Thus, attentional allocation may influence experienced utility by modulating (either directly or indirectly) the activity of brain mechanisms thought to represent hedonic value.

The belief that high income is associated with good mood is widespread but mostly illusory. People with above-average income are relatively satisfied with their lives but are barely happier than others in moment-to-moment experience, tend to be more tense, and do not spend more time in particularly enjoyable activities. Moreover, the effect of income on life satisfaction seems to be transient. We argue that people exaggerate the contribution of income to happiness because they focus, in part, on conventional achievements when evaluating their life or the lives of others.

Uncertainty is an unavoidable aspect of the human condition. Many significant choices must be based on beliefs about the likelihood of such uncertain events as the guilt of a defendant, the result of an election, the future value of the dollar, the outcome of a medical operation, or the response of a friend. Because we normally do not have adequate formal models for computing the probabilities of such events, intuitive judgment is often the only practical method for assessing uncertainty. The question of how lay people and experts evaluate the probabilities of uncertain events has attracted considerable research interest. (See, e.g., Einhorn & Hogarth, 1981; Kahneman, Slovic, & Tversky, 1982; Nisbett & Ross, 1980.) Much of this research has compared intuitive inferences and probability judgments to the rules of statistics and the laws of probability. The student of judgment uses the probability calculus as a standard of comparison much as a student of perception might compare the perceived size of objects to their physical sizes. Unlike the correct size of objects, however, the “correct” probability of events is not easily defined. Because individuals who have different knowledge or hold different beliefs must be allowed to assign different probabilities to the same event, no single value can be correct for all people. Furthermore, a correct probability cannot always be determined, even for a single person. Outside the domain of random sampling, probability theory does not determine the probabilities of uncertain events – it merely imposes constraints on the relations among them.

The present article offers an approach to scientific debate called adversarial collaboration. The approach requires both parties to agree on empirical tests for resolving a dispute and to conduct these tests with the help of an arbiter. In dispute were Hertwig's claims that frequency formats eliminate conjunction effects and that the conjunction effects previously reported by Kahneman and Tversky occurred because some participants interpreted the word “and” in “bank tellers and feminists” as a union operator. Hertwig proposed two new conjunction phrases, “and are” and “who are,” that would eliminate the ambiguity. Kahneman disagreed with Hertwig's predictions for “and are,” but agreed with his predictions for “who are.” Mellers served as arbiter. Frequency formats by themselves did not eliminate conjunction effects with any of the phrases, but when filler items were removed, conjunction effects disappeared with Hertwig's phrases. Kahneman and Hertwig offer different interpretations of the findings. We discuss the benefits of adversarial collaboration over replies and rejoinders, and present a suggested protocol for adversarial collaboration.

How does jury deliberation affect the pre-deliberation judgments of individual jurors? Do deliberating juries reduce or eliminate the erratic and unpredictable punitive damage awards that have been observed with individual jurors? In this paper we make progress on these two questions, in part by reporting the results of a study of over 500 mock juries composed of over 3000 jury eligible citizens. Our principal finding is that juries did not produce less erratic and more predictable awards than individuals, but actually made the problem worse, by making large awards much larger and small awards smaller still, even for the same case. Thus, a key effect of deliberation is often to polarize individual judgments, a pattern that has been found in many other group decision making contexts. This finding of polarization--the first of its kind in the particular context of punitive damage awards--has important implications for jury awards involving both punitive and compensatory damages, and raises questions about the common belief that groups, and in particular juries, generally make better decisions than individuals.

Two studies test whether people believe in optimal deterrence. The first provides people with personal injury cases that are identical except for variations in the probability of detection and explores whether lower probability cases produce higher punitive damage awards and whether higher probability cases produce lower awards. No such effect is observed. The second asks people whether they agree or disagree with administrative and judicial policies that increase penalties when the probability of detection is low and decrease penalties when the probability of detection is high. Substantial majorities reject these administrative and judicial policies. Policy implications for the role of the jury in achieving deterrence are explored. Copyright 2000 by the University of Chicago.

The study of heuristics and biases in judgement has been criticized in several publications by G. Gigerenzer, who argues that "biases are not biases" and "heuristics are meant to explain what does not exist" (1991, p. 102). The article responds to Gigerenzer's critique and shows that it misrepresents the authors' theoretical position and ignores critical evidence. Contrary to Gigerenzer's central empirical claim, judgments of frequency--not only subjective probabilities--are susceptible to large and systematic biases. A postscript responds to Gigerenzer's (1996) reply.

Objective. —To describe ways in which intuitive thought processes and feelings may lead patients to make suboptimal medical decisions. Design. —Review of past studies from the psychology literature. Results. —Intuitive decision making is often appropriate and results in reasonable choices; in some situations, however, intuitions lead patients to make choices that are not in their best interests. People sometimes treat safety and danger categorically, undervalue the importance of a partial risk reduction, are influenced by the way in which a problem is framed, and inappropriately evaluate an action by its subsequent outcome. These strategies help explain examples where risk perceptions conflict with standard scientific analyses. In the domain of emotions, people tend to consider losses as more significant than the corresponding gains, are imperfect at predicting future preferences, distort their memories of past personal experiences, have difficulty resolving inconsistencies between emotions and rationality, and worry with an intensity disproportionate to the actual danger. In general, such intangible aspects of clinical care have received little attention in the medical literature. Conclusion. —We suggest that an awareness of how people reason is an important clinical skill that can be promoted by knowledge of selected past studies in psychology. (JAMA. 1993;270:72-76)

The research was described in detail in preceding technical reports. This final report draws extensively on earlier ones', but it is somewhat selective, focusing on the more important and/or successful themes of the research. The report is organized as follows: (1) Studies of normality. (2) Further studies of contingent coding. (3) Processing of dimensional information in priming. (4) The language of counterfactuals. (5) Comparisons of intrapersonal and interpersonal norms. (6) Mental contamination. (7) Unintended comparisons. (8) Topic and referent in perceptual comparisons. (9) Anchoring.

In the second year of the grant I continued three projects initiated in the first year, and began two new lines of research. A study of contingent coding in normality judgements yielded disappointing results. We started a systematic exploration of the relation between discriminability and similarity, which we plan to extend to categorization and normality. A series of studies established essentially perfect dimensional independence in object-specific priming. We conducted a theoretical and empirical examination of close counterfactuals. Two separate projects dealt with the process of comparison, continuing and extending work reported last year. Keywords: Perception, (Psychology), Categorization, Comparison processes, Normality.

When people make moral or legal judgments in isolation, they produce a pattern of outcomes that they would themselves reject, if only they could see that pattern as a whole. A major reason is that human thinking is category-bound. When people see a case in isolation, they spontaneously compare it to other cases that are mainly drawn from the same category of harms. When people are required to compare cases that involve different kinds of harms, judgments that appear sensible when the problems are considered separately often appear incoherent and arbitrary in the broader context, Another major source of incoherence is what we call the translation problem: The translation of moral judgments into the relevant metrics of dollars and years is not grounded in either principle or intuition, and produces large differences among people. The incoherence produced by category-bound thinking is illustrated by an experimental study of punitive damages and contingent valuation. We also show how category-bound thinking and the translation problem combine to produce anomalies in administrative penalties. The underlying phenomena have large implications for many topics in law, including jury behavior, the valuation of public goods, punitive damages, criminal sentencing, and civil fines. We consider institutional reforms that might overcome the problem of predictably incoherent judgments. Connections are also drawn to several issues in legal theory, including valuation of life, incommensurability, and the aspiration to global coherence in adjudication. Language: en

Although legal scholars have disagreed about whether juries should be allowed to award punitive damages and about how judges should instruct them, the debate has included little discussion of jurors' cognitive capabilities. In this Article, Professors Sunstein, Kahneman, and Schkade respond to this gap by offering an experimental study. The study seeks to separate the tasks that a jury is suited to perform from those that a jury can accomplish only with great inconsistency. In personal injury cases, the study shows, jurors' normative judgments about outrageousness and appropriate punishment are relatively uniform, at least when measured on a bounded numerical scale (0 to 6). Indeed, these normative judgments are uniform across race, age, education, wealth, and gender When subjects map their judgments onto an unbounded dollar scale, however outcomes become erratic and unpredictable. Drawing on these results, the authors question the current legal approaches to the regulation of punitive damages. They then analyze various reform proposals designed to overcome erratic awards, including damage caps, compensatory judgement "multipliers," and conversion formulas that translate either jury judgments on bounded numerical scabs or jury arrangement of comparison cases into punitive damage awards. Finally the authors discuss the implications of the study for many other issues of law: including contingent valuation and compensatory damages in such areas as pain and suffering, libel, sexual harassment, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Language: en

This article examines the sensitivity of survey measures of willingness to pay for public goods. Visitors to a science museum in San Francisco were asked to provide estimates of their willingness to pay for saving seabirds from oil spills and for teaching English to immigrants under various experimental conditions. Willingness to pay was substantially reduced by a seemingly innocuous reminder about how many individuals would be affected by a tax or would be asked to contribute to a given cause. This finding, which cannot be explained by standard economic interpretations of willingness to pay, is consistent with previous studies showing that subtle changes in question order and wording can affect the nature of the responses. Language: en

The advantages and disadvantages of expanding the standard economic model by more realistic behavioral assumptions have received much attention. The issue raised in this article is whether it is useful to complicate-or perhaps to enrichthe model of the profit-seeking firm by considering the preferences that people have for being treated fairly and for treating others fairly. The absence of considerations of fairness and loyalty from standard economic theory is one of the most striking contrasts between this body of theory and other social sciences-and also between economic theory and lay intuitions about human behavior. Actions in many domains commonly conform to standards of decency that are more restrictive than the legal ones: the institutions of tipping and lost-and-found offices rest on expectations of such actions. Nevertheless, the standard microeconomic model of the profitmaximizing firm assigns essentially no role to The traditional assumption that fairness is irrelevant to economic analysis is questioned. Even profit-maximizing firms will have an incentive to act in a manner that is perceived as fair if the individuals with whom they deal are willing to resist unfair transactions and punish unfair firms at some cost to themselves. Three experiments demonstrated that willingness to enforce fairness is common. Community standards for actions affecting customers, tenants, and employees were studied in telephone surveys. The rules of fairness, some of which are not obvious, help explain some anomalous market phenomena. * The research for this paper was supported by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada. Kahneman and Thaler were also supported, respectively, by the U.S. Office of Naval Research and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Conversations with J. Brander, R. Frank, and A. Tversky were very helpful. We also thank Leslie McPherson and Daniel Treisman for their assistance. The paper presented at the conference and commented on by the discussants included a detailed report of study 3, which is only summarized here. It did not contain study 1, which was incomplete at the time. Daniel Kahneman is now in the Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley 94720.

The latency of reading a single word is increased by 20 to 40 msec if another object is present in the display. The delay is affected by the spatial organization of the display: a colored frame causes less delay when it surrounds the word than when it is shown on the opposite side of fixation. A small gap in the frame is also more efficiently detected as a secondary task when the frame is around the word than when the two are spatially separate. The advantage of integrated over separate presentation suggests that a "filtering cost" is incurred when two dis­ tinct perceptual objects compete for attention. Attention in filtering tasks operates on per­ ceptually distinct objects rather than on nodes in a semantic network. The act of reading is usually assumed to be auto­ matic, in the sense that it occurs both without volun­ tary control and without requiring attentional re­ sources, if a word or letter is sufficiently clear and close to the fovea. Yet a consistent delay in naming a single letter is produced by the addition of irrel­ evant objects to the display, even when these ob­ jects are highly discriminable from letters (Eriksen & Hoffman, 1972; Eriksen & Schultz, 1978, p. 18). Distractors such as black disks or color patches add about 30 msec to the latency of letter naming. Eriksen and Schultz labeled this effect cognitive masking. We have found a similar delay in read­ ing a single word when an irrelevant but highly dis­ criminable object is added to the display. We further found that the delay in reading increases as more objects are added, although probably at a decreas­ ing rate; it can be eliminated by precuing the loca­ tion of the word on each trial, and it is reduced or eliminated, with the same displays, when the sub­ ject is asked to press a key whenever a word is shown, instead of to read it (Kahneman, Treisman, & Burkell, in press). The fact that it disappears with precuing links the delay to attention rather than to peripheral in­ terference. The fact that it is reduced in search or detection suggests that the delay arises not in find­ ing the word but in allocating attention to it and/ or in filtering out the irrelevant objects. Focused attention to the word is not required when the re­ sponse is determined directly by the detection of its presence. We suggest attention must be narrowed down to the relevant stimulus, however, when the choice of a response demands further processing. We therefore interpret the observed delay of read

A theory of norms and normality is presented and applied to some phenomena of emotional responses, social judgment, and conversations about causes. Norms are assumed to be constructed ad hoc by recruiting specific representations. Category norms are derived by recruiting exemplars. Specific objects or events generate their own norms by retrieval of similar experiences stored in memory or by construction of counterfactual alternatives. The normality of a stimulus is evaluated by comparing it to the norms that it evokes after the fact, rather than to precomputed expectations. Norm theory is applied in analyses of the enhanced emotional response to events that have abnormal causes, of the generation of predictions and inferences from observations of behavior, and of the role of norms in causal questions and answers. This article is concerned with category norms that represent knowledge of concepts and with stimulus norms that govern comparative judgments and designate experiences as surprising. In the tradition of adaptation level theory (Appley, 1971; Helson, 1964), the concept of norm is applied to events that range in complexity from single visual displays to social interactions. We first propose a model of an activation process that produces norms, then explore the role of norms in social cognition. The central idea of the present treatment is that norms are computed after the event rather than in advance. We sketch a supplement to the generally accepted idea that events in the stream of experience are interpreted and evaluated by consulting precomputed schemas and frames of reference. The view developed here is that each stimulus selectively recruits its own alternatives (Garner, 1962, 1970) and is interpreted in a rich context of remembered and constructed representations of what it could have been, might have been, or should have been. Thus, each event brings its own frame of reference into being. We also explore the idea that knowledge of categories (e.g., "encounters with Jim") can be derived on-line by selectively evoking stored representations of discrete episodes and exemplars. The present model assumes that a number of representations can be recruited in parallel, by either a stimulus event or an

In contrast to formal theories of judgement and decision, which employ a single notion of probability, psychological analyses of responses to uncertainty reveal a wide variety of processes and experiences, which may follow different rules. Elementary forms of expectation and surprise in perception are reviewed. A phenomenological analysis is described, which distinguishes external attributions of uncertainty (disposition) from internal attributions of uncertainty (ignorance). Assessments of uncertainty can be made in different modes, by focusing on frequencies, propensities, the strength of arguments, or direct experiences of confidence. These variants of uncertainty are associated with different expressions in natural language; they are also suggestive of competing philosophical interpretations of probability.

Many sectors of Israeli life are characterized, not only by a rapid rate of change but also by the relative prevalence of planned social change. In response to the economic and social problems ultimately related to the achievement of statehood and the absorption of mass immigration, most public institutions are engaged in inducing and/or controlling change in many spheres of behavior. Recent years have witnessed an increase in the awareness on the part of such institutions, that they may profit from a closer acquaintance with modern social science. In addition to the utilization of sociological research and counseling, requests are made for training; many individuals who have been agents of social change for years are now prepared to take some time (usually very little time) to hear what social psychology has to offer.

The duration-intensity relationship was investigated for a task in which triads of digits were to be identified. Critical durations (tc) of 200-350 msec. were found for 5 Ss. Under identical stimulus conditions tc for subjective brightness, determined by a matching method, was about 100 msec. for 2 of the Ss. It was concluded that tc varies as a function of perceptual task and that it does not represent the duration of an early "sensory" phase of the visual process. (21 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved) Language: en