Week 11 Seminar: The catalogue, and its own problem

The human case, and the week the course grades its own sources — most of the famous literature about how badly you reason has not replicated.

Part IV — The human case, and its limits6 May 2027Week 11 lectureSlidesSchedule

This is the week the course is named after, and it is not the week where I list the ways you are stupid.

Three programmes, not one#

Simon’s bounded rationality, from 1955, is about optimising under constraint. It is not a deficiency account and never was. Tversky and Kahneman’s 1974 programme catalogued systematic departures from normative models, which is a different claim. Gigerenzer and Goldstein’s 1996 work on fast and frugal heuristics argues those departures are well matched to real environments and only look broken in artificial tasks.

Getting these three apart is most of the week’s work, because the popular version has merged them into “your brain is buggy”, which none of the three authors believes.

What did not hold#

Then the uncomfortable part, and the reason this course can’t simply teach the canon.

Ego depletion: a 23-laboratory preregistered replication with 2,141 participants found no effect, and Carter and colleagues’ meta-analytic work had already challenged the resource account. Social priming: largely collapsed. The Open Science Collaboration’s 2015 estimate of reproducibility across psychology is the background against which all of this should be read. Kahneman himself conceded that the priming chapter of Thinking, Fast and Slow rested on literature that did not hold.

And the dual-process story that organises most undergraduate teaching of this material is itself contested — Melnikoff and Bargh’s “The Mythical Number Two” is the reading.

The point#

A course called How and Why You’re Dumb that recited this canon uncritically would be doing the exact thing it claims to be about: accepting a satisfying story because it was satisfying. The literature on human error is subject to human error, and there is no vantage point outside that.

Gigerenzer’s “bias bias” — the argument that the field systematically over-diagnoses irrationality by comparing behaviour against norms that don’t apply — is the sharpest version, and I think he is partly right. You are welcome to tell me why he isn’t.

Your revision is due this week. It should be visibly harder to write after this seminar than before it.

Reading#

The paper this seminar is built around:

• Hagger and colleagues (2016). A multilab preregistered replication of the ego-depletion effect. Perspectives on Psychological Science.

The rest of the week’s reading:

• Simon (1955). A behavioral model of rational choice. Quarterly Journal of Economics.
• Tversky and Kahneman (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: heuristics and biases. Science.
• Gigerenzer and Goldstein (1996). Reasoning the fast and frugal way. Psychological Review — these three make different claims. Separating them is the week’s work.
• Melnikoff and Bargh (2018). The mythical number two. Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
• Open Science Collaboration (2015). Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science. Science.
• Carter and colleagues (2015). A series of meta-analytic tests of the depletion effect. JEP: General.
• Wason (1968). Reasoning about a rule. QJEP; Cosmides (1989). The logic of social exchange. Cognition.

Grades are not attached to papers here, because a grade belongs to a claim rather than to the paper it appears in — see evidence grades. Several of these papers contain claims at two different grades.