Raymond S. Nickerson

Raymond S. Nickerson is an American psychologist and author. He was a senior vice president at BBN Technologies, from which he is retired, He is now research professor at Tufts University in the Psychology Department. He has authored several books and is the founding editor of The Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied.

Topics he has written 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 (with David N. Perkins & Edward E. Smith) (1985) Erlbaum.
• Using Computers: Human Factors in Information Systems (1986) MIT Press.
• Reflections on Reasoning (1986) Erlbaum.
• Looking Ahead: Human Factors Challenges in a Changing World (1992) Erlbaum.
• Psychology and Environmental Change (2003) Erlbaum.
• Cognition and Chance: The Psychology of Probabilistic Reasoning (2004) Erlbaum.
• Aspects of Rationality: Reflections on What it Means to be Rational and Whether we are (2008) Psychology Press.
• Mathematical Reasoning: Patterns, Problems, Conjectures and Proofs (2010) Psychology Press.
• Conditional Reasoning: The Unruly Syntactics, Semantics, Thematics, and Pragmatics of "If" (2015) Oxford University Press.

Membership

• Fellow:
  • American Association for the Advancement of Science
  • American Psychological Association
  • Association for Psychological Science
  • Human Factors and Ergonomics Society
  • Society of Experimental Psychologists

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 (Eds.), Social Neuroscience of Empathy (pp. 43–56). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.