and that the results have encouraged my imitation of the founder.

 

The Psychology of Human Misjudgment

 

I have long been very interested in standard thinking errors.

 

However, I was educated in an era wherein the contributions of

non-patient-treating psychology to an understanding of misjudgment met little

approval from members of the mainstream elite. Instead, interest in psychology

was pretty well confined to a group of professors who talked and published

mostly for themselves, with much natural detriment from isolation and

groupthink.

 

And so, right after my time at Caltech and Harvard Law School, I possessed a

vast ignorance of psychology. Those institutions failed to require knowledge of

the subject. And, of course, they couldn’t integrate psychology with their other

subject matter when they didn’t know psychology. Also, like the Nietzsche

character who was proud of his lame leg, the institutions were proud of their

willful avoidance of “fuzzy” psychology and “fuzzy” psychology professors.

 

I shared this ignorant mindset for a considerable time. And so did a lot of

other people. What are we to think, for instance, of the Caltech course catalog

that for years listed just one psychology professor, self-described as a

“Professor of Psycho- analytical Studies,” who taught both “Abnormal Psychology”

and “Psychoanalysis in Literature”?