Social heuristics

[1] Social environments tend to be characterised by complexity and uncertainty, and in order to simplify the decision-making process, people may use heuristics, which are decision making strategies that involve ignoring some information or relying on simple rules of thumb.

At the intersection of these fields, social heuristics have been applied to explain cooperation in economic games used in experimental research.

Researchers in this vein also argue that heuristics may be just as or even more accurate when compared to more complex strategies, such as multiple regression.

[14] Examples of social heuristics include:[1][11] A dual-process approach to human cognition specifies two types of thought processes: one that is fast and happens unconsciously or automatically, and another that is slower and involves more conscious deliberation.

[28] In the dominant dual-systems approach in social psychology, heuristics are believed to be automatically and unconsciously applied.

[30] The social heuristics hypothesis is a theory put forth by Rand and colleagues that explains the link between intuition and cooperation.

[2] Under this theory, cooperating in everyday social situations tends to be successful, and as a result, cooperation is an internalized heuristic that is applied in unfamiliar social contexts, even those in which such behavior may not lead to the most personally advantageous result for the actor (such as a lab experiment).

[31] Following a dual-process framework, the social heuristics hypothesis contends that cooperation, which is automatic and intuitive, may be overridden by reflection.