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.