Information Sampling and Adaptive Cognition Edited by

A “sample ” is not only a concept from statistics that has penetrated common sense but also a metaphor that has inspired much research and theorizing in current psychology. The sampling approach empha-sizes the selectivity and biases inherent in the samples of information input with which judges and decision makers are fed. Because envi-ronmental samples are rarely random, or representative of the world as a whole, decision making calls for censorship and critical evalu-ation of the data given. However, even the most intelligent decision makers tend to behave like “naı̈ve intuitive statisticians”: They are quite sensitive to the data given but uncritical concerning the source of the data. Thus, the vicissitudes of sampling information in the en-vironment together with the failure to monitor and control sampling effects adequately provide a key to reinterpreting findings obtained in the past two decades of research on judgment and decision making. Klaus Fiedler is Professor of Psychology at the University of Heidel-berg in Germany. Among his main research interests are cognitive social psychology, language and communication, social memory, in-ductive cognitive processes in judgment and decision making, and computer modeling of the human mind. Professor Fiedler is the win-ner of the 2000 Leibniz Award. Peter Juslin is Professor of Psychology at Uppsala University in Sweden. His main research interests concern judgment and decision making, categorization, and computational modeling. He received th