Psychology of Intelligence Analysis

Richards Heuer's Psychology of Intelligence Analysis is based on a compilation of declassified articles from the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence, prepared for intelligence analysts and management. However, this book will benefit anyone conducting analyses of complex scenarios in a structured way, including health care professionals, financial and market analysts from all industry verticals, law enforcement and security staff, auditors and fraud investigators, and many others.

Heuer's point is that `analysts should be self-conscious about their reasoning processes. They should think about how they make judgements and reach conclusions, not just about the judgments and conclusions themselves'. The book presents a discussion of how mental models and subconscious cognitive processes can limit our reasoning capabilities (especially when coping with uncertainty and doubt), as well as an introduction on how we can try to understand and negate these effects.

In his analysis, Heuer presents data from internal and external cognitive studies, scrutinizes past CIA success and failure cases, and proposes a re-evaluation of the way we generally look at problems. The author brilliantly makes his point in chapter 13 by showing scenarios in which the reader is invited to review previous statements and `evidence' from the text, look at the discussion from different angles, methodically apply or remove certain models, and then compare his/her own conclusions as a professional analyst would be expected to do.

The outcomes are disturbing, but not surprising. Disturbing because it is alarming to see how our judgments are normally biased by previous experiences, pre-conceptions and mental models; also because it is extremely hard to change or even notice this fact by ourselves. Not surprising because we can see the same analytical problems happening over time; even when talented, trained professionals are warned about the dangers of cognitive biases, such as `events that people experience personally are more memorable than those they only read about. Concrete words are easier to remember than abstract words, and words of all types are easier to recall than numbers. [Information having the qualities cited] is more likely to be stored and remembered than abstract reasoning or statistical summaries, and therefore can be expected to have a greater immediate effect as well as a continuing impact on our thinking in the future'.