University of Michigan

University of Michigan appears in the book as a research institution whose studies help establish a central distinction between intuitive impressions and disciplined statistical reasoning. Its work first exposes the weakness of people’s unaided statistical intuitions and later contributes evidence that the attentional control associated with deliberate thinking can itself be strengthened, with measurable consequences for intelligence.

Research on Intuitive Statistics

A program of research at University of Michigan provided the starting point for the book’s account of whether people possess an intuitive grasp of statistical principles. Daniel Kahneman recounts hearing Amos Tversky describe the question in a seminar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem: people acquire an intuitive command of grammar in childhood, without knowing grammatical rules explicitly, but it was uncertain whether they developed a comparable feel for statistics. The seminar discussion initially produced a qualified yes, then moved toward a qualified no.

That institutional research became the prompt for Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s own collaboration. After discussing the issue, they met at Café Rimon in Jerusalem and designed a study of the statistical intuitions of sophisticated researchers. Their concern was not merely that ordinary people might misunderstand probability. They recognized that their own years of teaching and using statistics had not given them a reliable intuition for the instability of results based on small samples. They were too ready to trust findings supported by inadequate evidence and too willing to collect too few observations in their own research.

The Expert Survey and Its Consequences

The resulting survey presented realistic research scenarios to expert participants at a meeting of the Society of Mathematical Psychology, including the authors of two statistical textbooks. The participants greatly overestimated the probability that an original experimental result would be replicated successfully when the sample was small. They also gave poor advice to a fictitious graduate student about how many observations should be collected. The conclusion was unusually unsettling: even statisticians were not good intuitive statisticians.

University of Michigan therefore functions in the narrative as the source of an empirical question that turns back upon the investigators themselves. The study did not simply contrast experts with uninformed novices. It showed that professional knowledge could coexist with a systematic failure to appreciate sampling variability. Expertise in statistical vocabulary and practice did not automatically produce the intuitive calibration required for judgments about replication or sample size.

Attention, Control, and Intelligence

Later research associated with University of Michigan broadens the institution’s significance from statistical judgment to the development of cognitive control. Walter Mischel and his students’ famous study of four-year-old children is discussed alongside research on the relationship between self-control and cognitive aptitude. The children chose between one Oreo immediately and two cookies after waiting fifteen minutes alone in a room containing a single cookie and a bell for summoning the experimenter. About half managed to wait, chiefly by redirecting their attention away from the tempting reward.

The later differences were substantial. Ten or fifteen years afterward, the children who had resisted temptation showed stronger executive control, especially the ability to reallocate attention. As young adults they were less likely to take drugs, and they also achieved substantially higher scores on intelligence tests. The findings connect self-control not only with restraint but with the capacity to govern what receives mental attention.

A team of researchers at University of Michigan explored this connection more directly by attempting to improve intelligence through attention training. Children aged four to six completed five forty-minute sessions using computer games designed to demand increasingly precise control. In one exercise, they used a joystick to guide a cartoon cat toward a grassy area while avoiding mud; the grassy area progressively shrank as the muddy area expanded. Training improved executive control, and scores on nonverbal intelligence tests also rose, with the improvement maintained for several months. Related work identified genes involved in attentional control, showed that parenting techniques affected the ability, and found a close connection between controlling attention and controlling emotion.

Place in the Book’s Cognitive Framework

These studies reinforce the book’s broader account of System 1 and System 2. System 1 produces rapid, automatic impressions, while System 2 allocates attention to effortful activities such as complex computation, checking, and inhibition. The University of Michigan research on intuitive statistics demonstrates how readily confidence can outrun analysis when deliberate supervision is weak. The attention-training research suggests that the supervisory capacities of System 2 are not wholly fixed: they can be practiced and strengthened, at least in the children studied.

The institution’s role is consequently double. Its research helps reveal the limits of expert intuition in an environment where statistical reasoning is necessary, while its developmental studies show that cognitive control can be cultivated. Together, these strands support the book’s refusal to treat human judgment as simply rational or irrational. People are vulnerable to compelling first impressions, but the attentional capacities needed to question those impressions can develop through experience, training, and supportive conditions.

Broader Scholarly Connections

University of Michigan is also named in connection with Richard Nisbett and Eugene Borgida’s work on attribution and the psychology of prediction. In the book’s wider argument, such research contributes to an interdisciplinary movement linking psychology, judgment, and decision making. The institution thus appears not as a single-characterized backdrop but as part of a network of empirical programs that test how people infer causes, estimate probabilities, regulate attention, and translate limited information into confident conclusions.

Its significance lies in the contrast between what minds feel they know and what systematic evidence shows. The early statistical work makes the gap visible among experts; the later attention studies show that some of the mental machinery needed to narrow that gap can be improved. University of Michigan therefore represents both the laboratory discovery of cognitive limitation and the possibility of cognitive development.