Judgemental heuristics

Psychological “rules-of-thumb” or mental shortcuts† people use when making decisions, solving problems, and forming beliefs which function by reducing the range of possible solutions to a problem or alternatives for a decision – particularly in reaching decisions under conditions of uncertainty. These methods do not guarantee a correct solution, but raise the chance of solving the problem (in many situations), or tend to decrease the time taken to solve problems. In certain circumstances, though, heuristics lead to systematic biases and inconsistencies (see below).

Understandably, we rely on such “quick and dirty” judgements in contrast to a strategy of conducting a comprehensive and systematic analysis – collecting relevant data, testing various hypotheses, drawing appropriate inferences, thoroughly evaluating the probable positive and negative consequences, and arriving at optimal conclusions – since in many real-world circumstances in which we find ourselves adopting the latter course is frequently impractical given the constraints upon us.

Unfortunately, while heuristics often reduce complex and time-consuming tasks to more manageable proportions and can be efficient problem-solving devices, these ‘shortcuts’ are double-edged swords: enabling economical processing of information and rapid generation of solutions at the expense of thoroughness and precision – a trade-off of accuracy for speed and convenience.

Heuristic judgements may lead us to wrongly conclude  that a person, Jill, is an actress because she conforms to our stereotype of an actress, that Joseph is an alcoholic because he matches our conception of what an alcoholic is like, of mistaking the chances of dying in an accident as against the risk of death due to cardiovascular disease such as heart attack or stroke, or misconstruing the odds of being involved in a plane crash as compared with a car crash, and so on.

Also known as cognitive heuristics.

(see also: Availability heuristic, Representative heuristic, Anchoring effect, Availability, Salience, Vividness, Representativeness, judgement, Conjunction fallacy, Law of large numbers, 'Law of small numbers', Regression towards the mean, Base rate fallacy, actuarial prediction, Prospect theory, endowment effect, as well as: simulation heuristic, cancellation heuristic, judgement, decision-making, Decision analysis, decision-making under uncertainty, bounded rationality, bias)

† usually involving substantial preconscious processing of information, for example, some kind of selection limiting the type, amount, or scope of information which will subsequently be taken into consideration during the conscious stage in the decision task (see: Schema, Selective exposure, Selective attention). The particular context of the situation in which the decision is embedded changes the effectiveness with which cognitive heuristics are often applied, even though the logic of the two problems may be identical, for example, in Wason's card problem when presented as a social choice* people were much better able to identify the correct solution than when presented as a logic problem (see: Framing).

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