CONCEPT
The Heuristics and Biases Program
The research tradition Tversky and Kahneman founded in the 1970s to map the systematic departures of human judgment from rational ideals — the intellectual framework this entire book applies to the AI transition.
The heuristics and biases program is the research tradition initiated by Tversky and Kahneman in the late 1960s, dedicated to identifying the mental shortcuts (heuristics) humans use under uncertainty and the systematic errors (biases) these shortcuts produce. The program's central thesis — that human judgment is not noisy approximation to rational choice but structured departure from it in predictable directions — transformed psychology, economics, medicine, law, and public policy. The foundational heuristics — representativeness, availability, and anchoring — have been joined over five decades by dozens of additional biases, each documented with experimental rigor. The program provides the analytical toolkit for understanding why the AI transition produces such extreme and polarized responses from cognitively normal humans.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The program began with Tversky and Kahneman's early collaboration in Jerusalem, formalized in the 1974 Science paper 'Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases,' which introduced representativeness, availability, and anchoring as