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Heuristics (from Ancient Greek εὑρίσκω, heurískō, "I find, discover") is the process by which humans use mental shortcuts to arrive at decisions. Heuristics are simple strategies that humans, animals, [1] [2] [3] organizations, [4] and even machines [5] use to quickly form judgments, make decisions, and find solutions to complex problems.
A heuristic device is used when an entity X exists to enable understanding of, or knowledge concerning, some other entity Y. A good example is a model that, as it is never identical with what it models, is a heuristic device to enable understanding of what it models. Stories, metaphors, etc., can also be termed heuristic in this sense.
Explanations include information-processing rules (i.e., mental shortcuts), called heuristics, that the brain uses to produce decisions or judgments. Biases have a variety of forms and appear as cognitive ("cold") bias, such as mental noise, [5] or motivational ("hot") bias, such as when beliefs are distorted by wishful thinking. Both effects ...
Moral satisficing is a branch of bounded rationality that views moral behavior as based on pragmatic social heuristics rather than on moral rules or optimization principles. These heuristics are neither good nor bad per se, but only in relation to the environments in which they are used. [8]
Heuristics are simple for the brain to compute but sometimes introduce "severe and systematic errors." [ 6 ] For example, the representativeness heuristic is defined as "The tendency to judge the frequency or likelihood" of an occurrence by the extent of which the event "resembles the typical case."
Due to the availability heuristic, names that are more easily available are more likely to be recalled, and can thus alter judgments of probability. [31] Another example of the availability heuristic and exemplars would be seeing a shark in the ocean. Seeing a shark has a greater impact on an individual's memory than seeing a dolphin.
Social heuristics are not good or bad, or beneficial or harmful, per se, but solely in relation to the environments in which they are used. For instance, an adolescent may commit a crime not because of an evil character or a utilitarian calculation but due to following the social heuristic “do what your peers do.”
The heuristics-and-biases approach looks at patterns of biased judgments to distinguish heuristics from normative reasoning processes. Early studies supporting this approach associated each heuristic with a set of biases. These biases were "departures from the normative rational theory" and helped identify the underlying heuristics. [7]