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Preference, belief and similarity: Selected writings By A. Tversky (edited by E. Shafir) Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004, Paper £38.95, IBSN O 262 20144 5.
Although Amos Tversky was a major figure in 20th century psychology, he never wrote an overall account of his work and this volume comes as close to his academic legacy as we are likely to get. It is a collection of 40 of his papers partly chosen by him. These papers, single and joint authored, are on a wide variety of topics concerning people's judgements of similarity, uncertainty and preference. Each paper typically contains a substantive contribution to psychological theory plus several insightful empirical studies and their overlap is less than might be expected. A unifying theme of Tversky's work is measurement. His insights are often obtained by examining how people's judgements violate the constraints of measurement theory. In the main the papers are from respected and widely-available journals (11 are from Psychological Review). They should be standard reading for all academics in the field of decision making and are of interest to anyone wanting to know about how people think. My only quibble is that the papers' abstracts have been omitted. In what follows, I attempt the impossible by trying to summarize the contents.
The book is divided into three sections entitled similarity, judgement and preference. The first starts with a paper entitled Features of similarity which describes ways in which people's judgements of sameness are inconsistent with standard quantitative measures:...