Raymond S. Nickerson


Raymond S. Nickerson was an American psychologist and author. He was a senior vice president at BBN Technologies, from which he retired, and spent time as a research professor at Tufts University in the Psychology Department. He authored several books and was the founding editor of The Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied.
Topics he wrote about include: confirmation bias, null hypothesis significance testing, the exchange paradox the boy or girl paradox and long-term memory

Work

Books:
  • The Teaching of Thinking Erlbaum.
  • Using Computers: Human Factors in Information Systems MIT Press.
  • Reflections on Reasoning Erlbaum.
  • Looking Ahead: Human Factors Challenges in a Changing World Erlbaum.
  • Psychology and Environmental Change Erlbaum.
  • Cognition and Chance: The Psychology of Probabilistic Reasoning Erlbaum.
  • Aspects of Rationality: Reflections on What it Means to be Rational and Whether we are Psychology Press.
  • Mathematical Reasoning: Patterns, Problems, Conjectures and Proofs Psychology Press.
  • Conditional Reasoning: The Unruly Syntactics, Semantics, Thematics, and Pragmatics of "If" Oxford University Press.

Membership

Selected works

  • 1996. "Hempel's Paradox and Wason's Selection Task: Logical and Psychological Puzzles of Confirmation," Thinking and Reasoning 2, 1-31
  • 1998. "Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises," Review of General Psychology vol. 2, no. 2, 175-220
  • 2009, with F. S. Butler & M. Carlin. "Empathy and Knowledge Projection," in Decety & Ickes, Social Neuroscience of Empathy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.