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Volume 15, Issue10December 2002

Presidential Column

Susan T. Fiske
Susan T. Fiske
Princeton University
APS President 2002 - 2003
All columns

In this Issue:
Bringing Research on Judgment, Decision Making to Public Policy

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Published 6 times per year by the Association for Psychological Science, the Observer educates and informs on matters affecting the research, academic, and applied disciplines of psychology; promotes the scientific values of APS members; reports on issues of international interest to the psychological science community; and provides a vehicle for the dissemination on information about APS.

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  • Bringing Research on Judgment, Decision Making to Public Policy

    As part of this years continuing series illustrating the experiences of interdisciplinary research, Harvard Business School professor Max Bazerman reflects on the applicability of interdisciplinary decision science for solving some of our most pressing problems. - Susan T. Fiske APS President Research on the psychology of decision biases has been a growth field over the last two decades, culminating in Danny Kahneman 's Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002. Psychologists from various areas have enthusiastically assessed the significance of our judgmental errors, considered whether biases are evolutionarily adaptive, and explored the conditions under which these biases are strongest. Others have denied the existence of bias or argued for its benefits. Yet we are tragically behind in applying what we know about biases in human judgment to real-life policy decisions.