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    'The  most characteristic thing about mental life,  over     and  beyond the fact that one apprehends the  events  of     the world around one, is that one constantly goes beyond     the information given'.     J Bruner (1957)     Going Beyond The Information Given     (in H Gulber and others (eds)     Contemporary Approaches to Cognition)     '..........  Psychology as a science is, in fact,  in  a     shambles.  Unwittingly, two of the contributors to  that     issue of Psychology Today have, I think, explained  why.     As  Jerome Bruner puts it, there has been  a   continued     movement...away   from  the  restrictive   shackles   of     behaviorism .'     B.F. Skinner     Can the Experimental Analysis of Behavior Rescue Psychology?     Ch 11, Upon Further Reflection (1987)     The  approach  to  the  study of  judgment  that  this  book     represents  had  origins  in three  lines  of  research  that     developed in the 1950s and 1960s: the comparison of  clinical     and  statistical  prediction, initiated by  Paul  Meehl;  the     study  of  subjective probability in the  Bayesian  paradigm,     introduced   to   psychology  by  Ward   Edwards;   and   the     investigation of heuristics and strategies of reasoning,  for     which  Herbert Simon offered a program and Jerome  Bruner  an     example.    Our   collection  also  represents   the   recent     convergence  of the study of judgment with another strand  of     psychological  research: the study of causal attribution  and     lay psychological interpretation, pioneered by Fritz Heider.        Meehl's  classic  book,  published  in  1954,   summarized     evidence  for the conclusion that simple linear  combinations     of   cues  outdo  the  intuitive  judgments  of  experts   in     predicting  significant  behavioral  criteria.   The  lasting     intellectual  legacy  of  this  work,  and  of  the   furious     controversy   that   followed  it,  was  probably   not   the     demonstration that clinicians performed poorly in tasks that,     as Meehl noted, they should not have undertaken.  Rather,  it     was  the demonstration of a substantial  discrepancy  between     the _object_ive record of people's success in prediction  tasks     and the sincere beliefs of these people about the quality  of     their  performance.  This conclusion was  not  restricted  to     clinicians or to clinical prediction: People's impressions of     how  they reason, and of how well they reason, could  not  be     taken  at face value.  Perhaps because students  of  clinical     judgment often used themselves and their friends as subjects,     the  interpretation  of  errors  and  biases  tended  to   be     cognitive,   rather   than  psychodynamic:   Illusions,   not     delusions, were the model.          With the introduction of Bayesian ideas into psychological     research  by Edwards and his associates,  psychologists  were     offered  for  the  first time a fully  articulated  model  of     optimal  performance  under  uncertainty,  with  which  human     jufgments could be compared.  The matching of human judgments     to normative models was to become one of the major  paradigms     of research on judgment under uncertainty. Inevitably, it led     to concerns with the biases to which inductive inferences are     prone and the methods that could be used to correct them.     From the Preface to:     Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases     D Kahneman, P Slovic and A Tversky (1982)     Cambridge University Press     'Where the control of perceptual activity is  concerned,     two  solutions  are currently  popular  among  cognitive     psychologists.  The first, [...]  distinguishes  sharply     between  perception and attention. Perception proper  is     thought  to be determined by impinging stimuli, while  a     mechanism  of  selective  attention  remains  under  the     control of the individual himself. We have already  seen     that this proposal will not do; selectivity is  inherent     in the very process of information pickup and cannot  be     relegated  to  any  separate device. The  second,  which     must  be  considered here, is due to J.  S.  Bruner.  He     assigns  control  to  the perceiver who is  said  to  go     increasingly  far beyond the information given  as  he     acquires more sophisticated  perceptual skills. In  this     view,  the  main thrust of cognitive development  is  to     make  the adult freer than the child: he is said  to  be     less stimulus-bound and more inner-directed. '     U Neisser (1976)     Cognition and Reality     SELECTIVE PERCEPTION     We  do not first see, then define, we define first  and     then see.     Walter Lippmann (cited in Snyder & Uranowitz, 1978)     Look  in front of you. Now look at your hands.  Look  at     the  cover  of this book. How much of what  you  see  is     determined by your expectations?         If  you are like most people, your  perceptions  are     heavily influenced by what you expect to see. Even  when     something is right before your eyes, it is hard to  view     it  without preconceived notions. You may feel that  you     are looking at things in a completely unbiased way,  but     as will become clear, it is nearly impossible for people     to   avoid   biases  in  perception.   Instead,   people     selectively perceive what they expect and hope to see.     CALLING A SPADE A SPADE     One  of  the  earliest and  best  known  experiments  on     selective perception was published by Jerome Bruner  and     Leo Postman (1949). Bruner and Postman presented  people     with  a series of five playing cards on a  tachistoscope     (a  machine  that can display pictures  for  very  brief     intervals),   varying   the  exposure  time   from   ten     milliseconds  up  to one second. The cards  they  showed     these  people were similar to the cards on the cover  of     this  book. Take a moment now to note what  these  cards     are.         Did  you  notice anything strange about  the  cards?     Most  people  who casually view the cover of  this  book     never realize that one of the cards is actually a  black     three  of hearts! Bruner and Postman found that it  took     people more than four times longer to recognize a  trick     card  than  a  normal card, and  they  found  that  most     reactions to the incongruity could be categorized as one     of  four  types: dominance, compromise,  disruption,  or     recognition.         A dominance reaction consisted mainly in what Bruner     and  Postman  called perceptual denial.  For  example,     faced  with  a black three of hearts, people  were  very     sure  that  the card was a normal three of hearts  or  a     normal  three  of  spades. In the first  case,  form  is     dominant and color is assimilated to prior expectations,     and  in the second case, color is dominant and  form  is     assimilated.  In gruner and Postman s experiment, 27  of     28  subjects  (or  96  percent  of  the  people)  showed     dominance reactions at some point.         Another  reaction people had was to compromise.  For     instance, some of Bruner and Postman's subjects reported     a red six of spades as either a purple six of spades  or     a purple six of hearts. Others thought that a black four     of hearts was a greyish four of spades, or that a  red     six  of clubs was the six of clubs illuminated  by  red     light  (remember, experimental subjects were shown  the     cards on a tachistoscope). Half of Bruner and  Postman's     subjects  showed compromise responses to red cards,  and     11 percent showed compromise responses to black cards.         A  third way that people reacted to the  incongruity     was  with  disruption. When  responses  were  disrupted,     people  had  trouble forming a perception of  any  sort.     Disruption  was rare, but when it happened, the  results     were  dramatic.  For example, one  experimental  subject     exclaimed:   I don't know what the hell it is  now,  not     even  for sure whether it's a playing  card.  Likewise,     another  subject  said:   I can't  make  the  suit  out,     whatever  it  is. It didn't even look like a  card  that     time. I don't know what color it is now or whether  it's     a  spade  or heart. I'm not even sure now what  a  spade     looks like! My God!         The   final   reaction  was,  of  course,   one   of     recognition.  Yet  even when  subjects  recognized  that     something  was  wrong, they sometimes  misperceived  the     incongruity. Before realizing precisely what was  wrong,     six of Bruner and Postman's subjects began to sense that     something  was  strange  about  how  the  symbols   were     positioned  on the card. For example, a subject who  was     shown  a  red  six of spades thought  the  symbols  were     reversed,  and a subject who was shown a black  four  of     hearts  declared that the spades were turned the  wrong     way.         These  results show that expectations  can  strongly     influence  perceptions.  In  the  words  of  Bruner  and     Postman (p. 222): Perceptual organization is powerfully     determined by expectations built upon past commerce with     the  environment.  When people have  enough  experience     with  a particular situation, they often see  what  they     expect to see.         Item  33  of  the  Reader  Survey  contains  another     illustration of how prior experience can interfere  with     accurate  perceptions. In that question, you were  asked     to  count  how many times the letter f appeared  in  the     following sentence:          These  functional  fuses have  been  developed          after  years  of scientific  investigation  of          electric phenomena,
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