The Science of Fear: How the Culture of Fear Manipulates Your Brain

by Daniel Gardner

In 1957, Herbert Simon, a brilliant psychologist/economist/political scientist and future Nobel laureate, coined the term bounded rationality. We are rational, in other words, but only within limits. Kahneman and Tversky set themselves the task of discovering those limits. In 1974, they gathered together several years’ work and wrote a paper with the impressively dull title of “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases.” They published it in Science, rather than a specialist journal, because they thought some of the insights might be interesting to non-psychologists. Their little paper caught the attention of philosophers and economists and a furious debate began. It lasted for decades, but Kahneman and Tversky ultimately prevailed.