[2][3] The term cognitive miser was first introduced by Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor in 1984, who wrote that "People are limited in their capacity to process information, so they take shortcuts whenever they can.
First proposed in 1958 by Fritz Heider in The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations, this theory holds that humans think and act with dispassionate rationality whilst engaging in detailed and nuanced thought processes for both complex and routine actions.
Applying this framework to human thought processes, naïve scientists seek the consistency and stability that comes from a coherent view of the world and need for environmental control.
[12] The study of attributions had two effects: it created further interest in testing the naive scientist and opened up a new wave of social psychology research that questioned its explanatory power.
[9][page needed] According to Walter Lippmann's arguments in his classic book Public Opinion,[13] people are not equipped to deal with complexity.
"[13] That is to say, people live in a second-handed world with mediated reality, where the simplified model for thinking (i.e., stereotypes) could be created and maintained by external forces.
[13] Although Lippmann did not directly define the term cognitive miser, stereotypes have important functions in simplifying people's thinking process.
[14] Much of the cognitive miser theory is built upon work done on heuristics in judgment and decision-making,[15][page needed] most notably Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman results published in a series of influential articles.
[15][page needed] The wave of research on attributional biases done by Kahneman, Tversky and others effectively ended the dominance of Heider's naïve scientist within social psychology.
It is, in many ways, a unifying theory of ad-hoc decision-making which suggests that humans engage in economically prudent thought processes instead of acting like scientists who rationally weigh cost and benefit data, test hypotheses, and update expectations based upon the results of the discrete experiments that are our everyday actions.
Fiske and Taylor argue that it is rational to act as a cognitive miser due to the sheer volume and intensity of information and stimuli humans intake.
Acting as a cognitive miser should lead those with expertise in an area to more efficient information processing and streamlined decision making.
[22] However, as Lau and Redlawsk note, acting as cognitive miser who employs heuristics can have very different results for high-information and low-information voters.
"[22] In democracies, where no vote is weighted more or less because of the expertise behind its casting, low-information voters, acting as cognitive misers, can have broad and potentially deleterious choices for a society.
[22] Samuel Popkin argues that voters make rational choices by using information shortcuts that they receive during campaigns, usually using something akin to a drunkard's search.
Popkin's analysis is based on one main premise: voters use low information rationality gained in their daily lives, through the media and through personal interactions, to evaluate candidates and facilitate electoral choices.
Rather than using an in-depth understanding of scientific topics, people make decisions based on other shortcuts or heuristics such as ideological predistortions or cues from mass media due to the subconscious compulsion to use only as much information as necessary.
[30] Further, people spend less cognitive effort in buying toothpaste than they do when picking a new car, and that difference in information-seeking is largely a function of the costs.
The metaphor of cognitive misers could assist people in drawing lessons from risks, which is the possibility that an undesirable state of reality may occur.
A practical example of the cognitively miserly way of thinking in the context of a risk assessment of Deepwater Horizon explosion, is presented below.