Heuristic (psychology)
Heuristics (from Ancient Greek εὑρίσκω, heurískō, "I find, discover") is the process by which humans use mental shortcuts to arrive at decisions.
Heuristics are simple strategies that humans, animals,[1][2][3] organizations,[4] and even machines[5] use to quickly form judgments, make decisions, and find solutions to complex problems.
[9] Judgments and decisions based on heuristics are simply good enough to satisfy a pressing need in situations of uncertainty, where information is incomplete.
The economist and cognitive psychologist Herbert A. Simon introduced the concept of heuristics in the 1950s, suggesting there were limitations to rational decision making.
While some argue that pure laziness is behind the heuristics process, this could just be a simplified explanation for why people don't act the way we expected them to.
His more general research program posed the question of how humans make decisions when the conditions for rational choice theory are not met, that is how people decide under uncertainty.
For instance, professional real-estate entrepreneurs rely on satisficing to decide in which location to invest to develop new commercial areas: "If I believe I can get at least x return within y years, then I take the option.
However, elimination by aspects as a compensatory model could help to make such complex decisions since it is easier to apply and involves nonnumerical computations.
[Brighton & Gigerenzer, 2015] Similarly, psychological studies have shown that in situations where take-the-best is ecologically rational, a large proportion of people tend to rely on it.
A fast-and-frugal tree is a heuristic that allows to make classifications,[34] such as whether a patient with severe chest pain is likely to have a heart attack or not,[35] or whether a car approaching a checkpoint is likely to be a terrorist or a civilian.
In the case of the HIV tree, the ELISA is ranked first because it produces fewer misses than the Western blot test, and also is less expensive.
Tallying is a heuristic that considers the most viable choice in a decision making problem to be the one which outperforms its alternatives across most identifiable measures and criteria.
[4] In this sense, tallying differentiates from the take-the-best heuristic as the latter naturally discriminates based on the value applied to each aspect, and therefore can lead to opposing results.
[60] It may also play a role in the appeal of lotteries: to someone buying a ticket, the well-publicised, jubilant winners are more available than the millions of people who have won nothing.
[58] In one experiment that occurred before the 1976 U.S. Presidential election, some participants were asked to imagine Gerald Ford winning, while others did the same for a Jimmy Carter victory.
[62] Tversky and Kahneman offered the availability heuristic as an explanation for illusory correlations in which people wrongly judge two events to be associated with each other.
[14][63] While it is effective for some problems, this heuristic involves attending to the particular characteristics of the individual, ignoring how common those categories are in the population (called the base rates).
[66] One group of subjects had to rate Tom's similarity to a typical student in each of nine academic areas (including Law, Engineering and Library Science).
[63] Tversky and Kahneman gave subjects a short character sketch of a woman called Linda, describing her as, "31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright.
The explanation in terms of heuristics is that the judgment was distorted because, for the readers, the character sketch was representative of the sort of person who might be an active feminist but not of someone who works in a bank.
[63][77] They emphasised that even experts in statistics were susceptible to this illusion: in a 1971 survey of professional psychologists, they found that respondents expected samples to be overly representative of the population they were drawn from.
[78] According to Tversky and Kahneman's original description, it involves starting from a readily available number—the "anchor"—and shifting either up or down to reach an answer that seems plausible.
[82] Other experiments asked subjects if the average temperature in San Francisco is more or less than 558 degrees, or whether there had been more or fewer than 100,025 top ten albums by The Beatles.
They read documents including witness testimony, expert statements, the relevant penal code, and the final pleas from the prosecution and defence.
The escalation of commitment heuristic demonstrates that people often tend to lock themselves into losing courses of action in the hopes that investing more resources into an operation will turn around losses.
[96] Cognitive determinates that can influence escalation of commitment include self-justification, problem framing, sunk costs, goal substitution, self-efficacy, accountability, and illusion of control.
This reflects the escalation of commitment heuristic, and inevitably creates a cyclical process of reinvestment that has the potential to cause long-term issues economically, socially, and politically at both local and global scales.
[98] An effort-reduction framework proposed by Anuj K. Shah and Daniel M. Oppenheimer states that people use a variety of techniques to reduce the effort of making decisions.
[97][100] In 1975, psychologist Stanley Smith Stevens proposed that the strength of a stimulus (e.g. the brightness of a light, the severity of a crime) is encoded by brain cells in a way that is independent of modality.
Another source of heuristic attributes is emotion: people's moral opinions on sensitive subjects like sexuality and human cloning may be driven by reactions such as disgust, rather than by reasoned principles.
