Thinking, Fast and Slow

10: The Law of Small Numbers
“It is both…without additives”: Howard Wainer and Harris L. Zwerling,
“Evidence That Smaller Schools Do Not Improve Student Achievement,”
Phi Delta Kappan 88 (2006): 300–303. The example was discussed by
Andrew Gelman and Deborah Nolan, 
Teaching Statistics: A Bag of Tricks
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
50% risk of failing: Jacob Cohen, “The Statistical Power of Abnormal-
Social Psychological Research: A Review,” 
Journal of Abnormal and
Social Psychology 65 (1962): 145–53.
“Belief in the Law of Small Numbers”: Amos Tversky and Daniel
Kahneman, “Belief in the Law of Small Numbers,” 
Psychological Bulletin
76 (1971): 105–10.
“statistical intuitions…whenever possible”: The contrast that we drew
between intuition and computation seems to foreshadow the distinction
between Systems 1 and 2, but we were a long way from the perspective of
this book. We used 
intuition to cover anything but a computation, any
informal way to reach a conclusion.
German spies: William Feller, Introduction to Probability Theory and Its
Applications (New York: Wiley, 1950).
randomness in basketball: Thomas Gilovich, Robert Vallone, and Amos
Tversky, “The Hot Hand in Basketball: On the Misperception of Random
Sequences,” 
Cognitive Psychology 17 (1985): 295–314.
11: Anchors
“‘reasonable’ volume”: Robyn Le Boeuf and Eldar Shafir, “The Long and
Short of It: Physical Anchoring Effects,” 
Journal of Behavioral Decision
Making 19 (2006): 393–406.
nod their head: Nicholas Epley and Thomas Gilovich, “Putting Adjustment
Back in the Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristic: Differential Processing of
Self-Generated and Experimenter-Provided Anchors,” 
Psychological

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Science 12 (2001): 391–96.
stay closer to the anchor: Epley and Gilovich, “The Anchoring-and-
Adjustment Heuristic.”
associative coherence: Thomas Mussweiler, “The Use of Category and
Exemplar Knowledge in the Solution of Anchoring Tasks,” 
Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology 78 (2000): 1038–52.
San Francisco Exploratorium: Karen E. Jacowitz and Daniel Kahneman,
“Measures of Anchoring in Estimation Tasks,” 
Person {pantion ality and
Social Psychology Bulletin 21 (1995): 1161–66.
substantially lower: Gregory B. Northcraft and Margaret A. Neale,
“Experts, Amateurs, and Real Estate: An Anchoring-and-Adjustment
Perspective on Property Pricing Decisions,” 
Organizational Behavior and
Human Decision Processes 39 (1987): 84–97. The high anchor was 12%
above the listed price, the low anchor was 12% below that price.
rolled a pair of dice: Birte Englich, Thomas Mussweiler, and Fritz Strack,
“Playing Dice with Criminal Sentences: The Influence of Irrelevant Anchors
on Experts’ Judicial Decision Making,” 
Personality and Social
Psychology Bulletin 32 (2006): 188–200.
NO LIMIT PER PERSON
: Brian Wansink, Robert J. Kent, and Stephen J. Hoch,
“An Anchoring and Adjustment Model of Purchase Quantity Decisions,”
Journal of Marketing Research 35 (1998): 71–81.
resist the anchoring effect: Adam D. Galinsky and Thomas Mussweiler,
“First Offers as Anchors: The Role of Perspective-Taking and Negotiator
Focus,” 
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81 (2001): 657–
69.
otherwise be much smaller: Greg Pogarsky and Linda Babcock,
“Damage Caps, Motivated Anchoring, and Bargaining Impasse,” 
Journal
of Legal Studies 30 (2001): 143–59.
amount of damages: For an experimental demonstration, see Chris
Guthrie, Jeffrey J. Rachlinski, and Andrew J. Wistrich, “Judging by
Heuristic-Cognitive Illusions in Judicial Decision Making,” 
Judicature 86
(2002): 44–50.