Judgement and Decision Making

In his chapter, “Wason’s Puzzle and Real Problems,” in a conference volume on behavioral economics (E. L. Khalil, editor, in press), Professor Howard Margolis uses a much-studied cognitive illusion (Wason’s puzzle) to show why the logical error in this puzzle—and therefore perhaps in far more serious matters as well—goes much deeper than a logical slip easily seen as an error once pointed out. Persuading someone (such as a juror, voter, or investor) that his or her judgment is in error may be very difficult even when the logical error is in principle clear. For as in Wason, the intuition yielding the error may turn on a misperception that a person cannot see, and others might share the misperception. Correcting a socially invisible misperception will be vastly more difficult than pointing to a logical slip that becomes undeniable once it is pointed out, which helps account for the notorious difficulty in making even a strong case persuasive when it runs against popular intuition.

The possibility of being misled by confident but seriously distorted intuition crops up again in Margolis’s new book, It Started with Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution (McGraw-Hill, 2002). Cutting edge science, after all, is all about dealing with what is beyond what we know from experience. Margolis rethinks the Scientific Revolution in a way that gives new life to Thomas Kuhn’s notion of paradigm shifts. Around 1600, something happened to radically, and permanently, change the pace of scientific discovery. But what occasioned this change? All the evidence for a revolution was there. The discoveries in science near 1600 easily outweighed everything produced in the previous fourteen centuries. What appeared, Margolis shows, was a radically novel propensity to look for evidence that was not directly in sight, but hidden around some unexplored corner. For what Copernicus discovered had been logically readily at hand for every astronomer since Ptolemy. But for 1400 years, until Copernicus, no one could see it.

Related journal articles by Margolis include “Being There with Thomas Kuhn” (forthcoming in Social Epistemology), and “Pivotal Voting and the Emperor’s New Clothes,” (Social Choice & Welfare [Winter 2002]). In a new project, Margolis is exploring the paradoxical results of a long series of social choice experiments. The data were accumulated by many researchers over several decades. They concern choice, usually for real money but in a laboratory setting, which puts a person’s self-interest in competition with whatever propensity he or she has favoring cooperation. The data favor some role for both motives but in ways that sometimes seem to make no sense in terms of the incentives that the players face. The aim of the project is to see whether a novel approach can succeed in revealing robust regularities across this rather chaotic data.