Bounded rationality

The concept concerns the limitations of the human mind’s information processing capacity – actors’ mental processes underlying such things as reasoning, for example, the search for counter-examples to a proffered conclusion.

Such processes may fail because of the limitations of human performance, on working memory capacity, on how much we can attend to, or on how quickly we can make decisions, and so on. People’s ordinarily unconscious use of shortcuts – heuristics which sometimes result in wrong answers – has its impetus in these limitations. Believable conclusions are often true, so mental shortcuts leading us to accept believable conclusions without going to the effort of a thorough analysis will on many occasions be a practical, reasonable response.

(see also: Satisficing, metacognitive shortfall, judgement, rational, decision analysis, fallibility)