Week 11: The catalogue, graded by its own scheme
Three separate research programmes that got merged into one slogan, and how much of the famous version did not replicate.
Simon’s bounded rationality, the heuristics-and-biases programme, and Gigerenzer’s ecological rationality make different claims, and none of the three authors holds the position that “your brain is buggy”. Separating them is the lecture’s first half.
The second half is the replication record: ego depletion nulled across 23 laboratories and 2,141 participants, social priming largely gone, the dual-process framing itself contested, and Kahneman’s own concession about the priming chapter of his book.
A course with this title that recited the canon would be committing the error it claims to diagnose. There is no vantage point outside that, which is the week’s actual lesson.
Teaching team
- Halvard Emms — convenor