The distortion of beliefs in the face of uncertainty

Lennart Sjöberg ()
Additional contact information
Lennart Sjöberg: Department of Economic Psychology, Postal: Stockholm School of Economics, P.O. Box 6501, SE-113 83 Stockholm, Sweden

No 2002:9, SSE/EFI Working Paper Series in Business Administration from Stockholm School of Economics

Abstract: Judgements and beliefs often are distorted. They are affected by underlying values and reflect strong tendencies toward wishful thinking. In action, biased thinking may or may not be detrimental, and there is a very delicate balance to keep between the need to motivate oneself for forceful action, and to keep a realistic view of the possibilities of success. People encounter problems, calling for thought and the formation of constructs, only rather rarely, but when they do they tend to be in an unpleasant emotional state. Uncertainty is one such state, in which one encounters difficult problems and expects little success.

Keywords: thought biases; heuristics; judgement; decision making (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 pages
Date: 2002-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published in International Journal of Management and Decision Making, 2007, pages 1-29.

Downloads: (external link)
http://swoba.hhs.se/hastba/papers/hastba2002_009.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhb:hastba:2002_009

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SSE/EFI Working Paper Series in Business Administration from Stockholm School of Economics The Economic Research Institute, Stockholm School of Economics, P.O. Box 6501, SE 113 83 Stockholm, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Helena Lundin ().