The academic papers of Tversky and Kahneman are an important exception. Even as they wrote for a narrow academic audience, Danny and Amos seemed to sense a general reader waiting for them, in the future. Danny’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow was openly directed at the general reader, and that helped this general reader in many ways. Actually, I watched Danny agonize over his book for several years, and even read early drafts of some of it. Everything Danny wrote, like everything he said, was full of interest. Still, every few months he’d be consumed with despair, and announce that he was giving up writing altogether—before he destroyed his own reputation. To forestall his book’s publication he paid a friend to find people who might convince him not to publish it. After its publication, when it landed on the New York Times bestseller list, he bumped into another friend, who later described what must be the oddest response any author has ever had to his own success. “You’ll never believe what happened,” said Danny incredulously. “Those people at the New York Times made a mistake and put my book on the bestseller list!” A few weeks later, he bumped into the same friend. “It’s unbelievable what is going on,” said Danny. “Because those people at the New York Times made that mistake and put my book on their bestseller list, they’ve had to keep it there!”
I would encourage anyone interested in my book to read Danny’s book, too. For those whose thirst for psychology remains unquenched, I’d recommend two other books, which helped me come to grips with the field. The eight-volume Encyclopedia of Psychology will answer just about any question you might have about psychology, clearly and directly. The nine-volume (and counting) A History of Psychology in Autobiography will answer just about any question you might have about psychologists, though less directly. The first volume of this remarkable series was published in 1930, and it continues to motor along, fueled by an endlessly renewable source of energy: the need felt by psychologists to explain why they are the way they are.
At any rate, in grappling with my subject, I obviously leaned on the work of others. Here are those I leaned on:
INTRODUCTION: THE PROBLEM THAT NEVER GOES AWAY
Thaler, Richard H., and Cass R. Sunstein. “Who’s on First.” New Republic, August 31, 2003. https://newrepublic.com/article/61123/whos-first.
CHAPTER 1: MAN BOOBS
Rutenberg, Jim. “The Republican Horse Race Is Over, and Journalism Lost.” New York Times, May 9, 2016.
CHAPTER 2: THE OUTSIDER
Meehl, Paul E. Clinical versus Statistical Prediction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1954.
——— . “Psychology: Does Our Heterogeneous Subject Matter Have Any Unity?” Minnesota Psychologist 35 (1986): 3–9.
CHAPTER 3: THE INSIDER
Edwards, Ward. “The Theory of Decision Making.” Psychological Bulletin 51, no. 4 (1954): 380–417. http://worthylab.tamu.edu/courses_files/01_edwards_1954.pdf.
Guttman, Louis. “What Is Not What in Statistics.” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 26, no. 2 (1977): 81–107. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2987957.
May, Kenneth. “A Set of Independent Necessary and Sufficient Conditions for Simple Majority Decision.” Econometrica 20, no. 4 (1952): 680–84.
Rosch, Eleanor, Carolyn B. Mervis, Wayne D. Gray, David M. Johnson, and Penny Boyes-Braem. “Basic Objects in Natural Categories.” Cognitive Psychology 8 (1976): 382–439. http://www.cns.nyu.edu/~msl/courses/2223/Readings/Rosch-CogPsych1976.pdf.
Tversky, Amos. “The Intransitivity of Preferences.” Psychological Review 76 (1969): 31–48.
——— . “Features of Similarity.” Psychological Review 84, no. 4 (1977): 327–52. http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/dm/Tversky-features.pdf.
CHAPTER 4: ERRORS
Hess, Eckhard H. “Attitude and Pupil Size.” Scientific American, April 1965, 46–54.
Miller, George A. “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information.” Psychological Review 63 (1956): 81–97.
CHAPTER 5: THE COLLISION
Friedman, Milton. “The Methodology of Positive Economics.” In Essays in Positive Economics, edited by Milton Friedman, 3–46. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953.
Krantz, David H., R. Duncan Luce, Patrick Suppes, and Amos Tversky. Foundations of Measurement—Vol. I: Additive and Polynomial Representations; Vol. II: Geometrical, Threshold, and Probabilistic Representations; Vol III: Representation, Axiomatization, and Invariance. San Diego and London: Academic Press, 1971–90; repr., Mineola, NY: Dover, 2007.
Tversky, Amos, and Daniel Kahneman. “Belief in the Law of Small Numbers.” Psychological Bulletin 76, no. 2 (1971): 105–10.
CHAPTER 6: THE MIND’S RULES
Glanz, James, and Eric Lipton. “The Height of Ambition,” New York Times Magazine, September 8, 2002.
Goldberg, Lewis R. “Simple Models or Simple Processes? Some Research on Clinical Judgments,” American Psychologist 23, no. 7 (1968): 483–96.
——— . “Man versus Model of Man: A Rationale, Plus Some Evidence, for a Method of Improving on Clinical Inferences.” Psychological Bulletin 73, no. 6 (1970): 422–32.
Hoffman, Paul J. “The Paramorphic Representation of Clinical Judgment.” Psychological Bulletin 57, no. 2 (1960): 116–31.
Kahneman, Daniel, and Amos Tversky. “Subjective Probability: A Judgment of Representativeness.” Cognitive Psychology 3 (1972): 430–54.
Meehl, Paul E. “Causes and Effects of My Disturbing Little Book.” Journal of Personality Assessment 50, no. 3 (1986): 370–75.
Tversky, Amos, and Daniel Kahneman. “Availability: A Heuristic for Judging Frequency and Probability.” Cognitive Psychology 5, no. 2 (1973): 207–32.
CHAPTER 7: THE RULES OF PREDICTION
Fischhoff, Baruch. “An Early History of Hindsight Research.” Social Cognition 25, no. 1 (2007): 10–13.
Howard, R. A., J. E. Matheson, and D. W. North. “The Decision to Seed Hurricanes.” Science 176 (1972): 1191–1202. http://www.warnernorth.net/hurricanes.pdf.
Kahneman, Daniel, and Amos Tversky. “On the Psychology of Prediction.” Psychological Review 80, no. 4 (1973): 237–51.
Meehl, Paul E. “Why I Do Not Attend Case Conferences.” In Psychodiagnosis: Selected Papers, edited by Paul E. Meehl, 225–302. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1973.
CHAPTER 8: GOING VIRAL
Redelmeier, Donald A., Joel Katz, and Daniel Kahneman. “Memories of Colonoscopy: A Randomized Trial,” Pain 104, nos. 1–2 (2003): 187–94.
Redelmeier, Donald A., and Amos Tversky. “Discrepancy between Medical Decisions for Individual Patients and for Groups.” New England Journal of Medicine 322 (1990): 1162–64.
——— . Letter to the editor. New England Journal of Medicine 323 (1990): 923. http://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJM199009273231320.
——— . “On the Belief That Arthritis Pain Is Related to the Weather.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 93, no. 7 (1996): 2895–96. http://www.pnas.org/content/93/7/2895.full.pdf.
Tversky, Amos, and Daniel Kahneman. “Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases.” Science 185 (1974): 1124–31.
CHAPTER 9: BIRTH OF THE WARRIOR PSYCHOLOGIST
Allais, Maurice. “Le Comportement de l’homme rationnel devant le risque: critique des postulats et axiomes de l’école américaine.” Econometrica 21, no. 4 (1953): 503–46. English summary: https://goo.gl/cUvOVb.
Bernoulli, Daniel. “Specimen Theoriae Novae de Mensura Sortis,” Commentarii Academiae Scientiarum Imperialis Petropolitanae, Tomus V [Papers of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in Petersburg, Vol. V], 1738, 175–92. Dr. Louise Sommer of American University did apparently the first translation into English: for Econometrica 22, no. 1 (1954): 23–36. See also Savage (1954) and Coombs, Dawes, and Tversky (1970).
Coombs, Clyde H., Robyn M. Dawes, and Amos Tversky. Mathematical Psychology: An Elementary Introduction. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970.
Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. The Jack and Jill scenario in chapter 9 of the present book is from p. 275 of the hardcover edition.
von Neumann, John, and Oskar Morgenstern. Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1944; 2nd ed., 1947.
Savage, Leonard J. The Foundations of Statistics. New York: Wiley, 1954.
CHAPTER 10: THE ISOLATION EFFECT
Kahneman, Daniel, and Amos Tversky. “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk.” Econometrica 47, no. 2 (1979): 263–91.
CHAPTER 11: THE RULES OF UNDOING
Hobson, J. Allan, and Robert W. McCarley. “The Brain as a Dream State Generator: An Activation-Synthesis Hypothesis of the Dream Process.” American Journal of Psychiatry 134, no. 12 (1977): 1335–48.
——— . “The Neurobiological Origins of Psychoanalytic Dream Theory.” American Journal of Psychiatry 134, no. 11 (1978): 1211–21.
Kahneman, Daniel. “The Psychology of Possible Worlds.” Katz-Newcomb Lecture, April 1979.