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 (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.