Heuristic

In psychology, heuristics are simple, efficient rules, learned or hard-coded by evolutionary processes, that have been proposed to explain how people make decisions, come to judgments, and solve problems typically when facing complex problems or incomplete information. These rules work well under most circumstances, but in certain cases lead to systematic errors or cognitive biases.[3]

Types of Heuristic:

The Representativeness Heuristic:

We live our lives believing that all things occur randomly and appear randomly. The representative heuristic is used quite often when making decisions. We make our decisions based on the likeliness of a sample to occur in the population. Random outcomes are more accepted than orderly outcomes as long as the outcome is due to a random process. Ex. Coin toss, rolling dice, etc.

The Availability Heuristic :

Our memory plays a major role in decision making. Specifically when making judgments about frequency and probability. We make these judgments based on how easy it is to think of examples. It should be obvious how this heuristic can lead someone to make the wrong decision.

The Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristic :

This heuristic is like the availability heuristic because it’s sometimes based on previous knowledge. Making an initial judgment is the anchoring, we make an approximation about something. Once it’s anchored we then make adjustments according to additional information that we may receive.