Heuristics and biases
A heuristic is a mental shortcut that produces a usable answer quickly without working the problem through. Tversky and Kahneman showed that people judge how likely something is by how easily examples come to mind, which is availability, and judge how well a case fits a category by how closely it resembles the stereotype, which is representativeness. A bias is the systematic error a heuristic produces: because plane crashes are memorable and vivid, availability makes them feel more common than they are. The shortcuts are not simply defects, since they are fast and often right, but their errors are patterned and predictable rather than random, which is what makes them scientifically interesting.
Why it matters
It replaced the assumption that people reason like flawed calculators with the finding that their errors follow rules, which can be measured and sometimes designed around.
Also written: heuristic, cognitive bias, availability heuristic, representativeness heuristic
Where it comes up
Read about Heuristics and biases on Wikipedia
Sources
- Heuristic (psychology) Wikipedia
- Cognitive bias WikipediaAn index of the specific biases named in the literature.
- Bounded Rationality Stanford Encyclopedia of PhilosophyCovers the counter-argument that shortcuts suited to a real environment are not errors at all.
