of Initially Rejected Students,” JAMA 257 (1987): 47–51. Jason Dana and
Robyn M. Dawes, “Belief in the Unstructured Interview: The Persistence of
an Illusion,” working paper, Department of Psychology, University of
Pennsylvania, 2011. William M. Grove et al., “Clinical Versus Mechanical
Prediction: A Meta-Analysis,” Psychological Assessment 12 (2000): 19–
30.
Dawes’s famous article : Robyn M. Dawes, “The Robust Beauty of
Improper Linear Models in Decision Making,” American Psychologist 34
(1979): 571–82.
not affected by accidents of sampling : Jason Dana and Robyn M. Dawes,
“The Superiority of Simple Alternatives to Regression for Social Science
Predictions,” Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics 29 (2004):
317–31.
Dr. Apgar : Virginia Apgar, “A Proposal for a New Method of Evaluation of
the Newborn Infant,” Current Researches in Anesthesia and Analgesia 32
(1953): 260–67. Mieczyslaw Finster and Margaret Wood, “The Apgar
Score Has Survived the Test of Time,” Anesthesiology 102 (2005): 855–
57.
virtues of checklists : Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get
Things Right (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009).
organic fruit : Paul Rozin, “The Meaning of ‘Natural’: Process More
Important than Content,” Psychological Science 16 (2005): 652–58.

2 {ce

moderated by an arbiter : Mellers, Hertwig, and Kahneman, “Do Frequency
Representations Eliminate Conjunction Effects?”
articulated this position : Klein, Sources of Power.
kouros : The Getty Museum in Los Angeles brings in the world’s leading
experts on Greek sculpture to view a kouros—a marble statue of a striding
boy—that it is about to buy. One after another, the experts react with what
one calls “intuitive repulsion”—a powerful hunch that the kouros is not
2,500 years old but a modern fake. None of the experts can immediately
say why they think the sculpture is a forgery. The closest any of them could
come to a rationale is an Italian art historian’s complaint that something—
he does not know exactly what—“seemed wrong” with the statue’s
fingernails. A famous American expert said that the first thought that came
to his mind was the word fresh , and a Greek expert flatly stated, “Anyone
who has ever seen a sculpture coming out of the ground could tell that that
thing has never been in the ground.” The lack of agreement on the reasons
for the shared conclusion is striking, and rather suspect.