Heuristics and What are They

By: Mary Anne Winslow
Submitted: 2007-01-17 16:26:58
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Heuristics and its nature, as well as the role that they play in the understanding and clarification of human behavior can not be ignored in the study of cognitive psychology. Heuristics, put in simple terms, can be recognized and defined as shortcuts employed by humans to draw up potential solutions to a task or problem at the beginning of the problem and are widely recognized as highly effective, remarkably good methods for making spontaneous and rapid decisions or judgments even under heavy time constraints. As for how they can be considered as either helpful or as a hindrance in the decision making process and in problem solving, there are obvious implications from the very nature of the concept of heuristics, such as the time saving and convenience of such shortcuts and the possible drawback of making rash decisions and eliminating potentially viable means to come to a solution because of a lack of information or inexperience in that area. Based on the definition of what heuristics are, there are a variety of different conclusions that you could come to in regards to what they tell us about how our mind works. In this essay we shall attempt to identify what conclusions can be made about how our mind works when considering the effects that heuristics have.

Before we can explore the implications of heuristics we first have to define what the term actually means. The concept of heuristics means the formulating of a hypothetical solution to an impending problem prior to beginning investigating the actual problem itself. This hypothetical solution will then serve to guide the course of the investigation of the problem, allowing it to be modified or altered as new information is uncovered. Heuristics serve to streamline the number of possible solutions and increase the plausibility of those possible solutions.

A more simple definition of what a heuristic is would be that they are shortcuts that allow for fast and reliable decision making drawing from all information that is already available. This helps us vastly reduce the number of potential solutions in an instant, by processing out irrelevant information and leaving only information that is relevant to the task being dealt with.

There are also different types of heuristic to consider. First there is the recurrence heuristic. This helps us to make judgments based on our own experiences in the past in similar scenarios, making us assume a similar outcome will be evident. The second type of heuristic is the representative heuristic. This is an heuristic that is based on an identified standard, such as assuming if you have enjoyed a particular event in the past, then you will still enjoy it in the future, or that you are more likely to trust the judgment and taste of someone whose tastes and opinions you recognize as being similar to your own.

Heuristics basically pre-empt a suitable solution to an impending problem based on prior knowledge. Being, in a manner of speaking a form of shortcut, heuristics will both obviously have positives and negatives attached to them because of how they are? We will now explore both how they help decision making and problem solving and how they can also serve to hinder the decision making and problem solving processes.

The ways in which heuristics can be considered to be helpful for people are numerous. Heuristics work on a system of bounded rationality, an d therefore save time and provide results that provide comparable results to more complex algorithms, in a man made environment where bounded rationality is often the only real option in the face of limited time knowledge constraints. In this way it is obvious to see how heuristics can be seen as helpful and useful to people as they save time where little may be available, and enable smart, reasoned decisions and choices to be made in a short amount of time and with a minimum amount of information available. An example of a hypothetical situation where recurrence heuristics could prove to be helpful, could be if an individual was under attack or facing a situation wherein danger was imminent they would, in an instant, draw on their past experiences to make their decision as to whether or not to flee from the situation or stick it out and fight, making an instant, yet reasoned decision up against a highly constrained period of time. So, heuristics can be helpful to us because they allow us to make rational decisions in the face of limited knowledge and pressing time.

In spite of the obvious ways in which heuristics, both recurrence and representative, can be regarded as a help to our thought process, as outlined in the previous section of this essay, there are also ways in which heuristics could be thought of as a hindrance to us in the study of cognitive psychology. Because the nature of basic heuristics is likened very much to the idea of a shortcut this presents certain, apparent implications. The concept of a shortcut is to save time by finding and operationalising a quicker route, and because a faster route is taken decisions or solutions to problems could be seen as rushed or made under haste and vital information may be missed or ignored.

Working on the basis of a recurrence heuristic, one might choose a solution to a problem or scenario that they face just because they are familiar with that solution, dismissing other, potentially more viable, and solutions due to a lack of knowledge. This raises the idea of an heuristic being not unlike a form of bias, dismissing certain options or choices in favor of others due to familiarity or preference.

Representative heuristics also cloud judgment and lead to unreasoned decisions being made based on preconceptions of certain levels and standards. Such as you could be lead to trust the opinion of someone, even if you may have doubts about it, purely because you regard their opinion as usually being similar to your own, therefore clouding your judgment. Even though heuristics do provide us with much help and assistance in decision making and problem solving, they also can lead us to miss information or make poorly guided decisions based on experience and usual similarity of opinion with another.

The nature of what heuristics are and the ways in which they serve to guide and direct our judgment can be interpreted as telling us a variety of different things about how our mind works. One way that the study of heuristics provides us with information about how our mind works is that it shows that our mind creates 'shortcuts' to speed up and ease the processing and accessing of information and knowledge that we are presented with and store. It also shows that our mind helps to simplify the processing of data, yet still provides effective results.

Even though the use and application of heuristics may limit the information that is searched and processed, it is thought that even basic heuristics still manage to compare favorably to the more detailed and complex algorithms, especially when generalizing to new information and data. Because of the way that heuristics are structured by the mind they allow for decisions to be made intelligently, using a minimum of information showing just how effectively the mind can work. By studying heuristics, and how they work, it shows us that the human mind can process and access information efficiently and quickly by creating shortcuts, yet still provide effective results.

Heuristics, and the cognitive study into them, tell us much about the human mind and the decision making and problem solving processes. In very basic terms heuristics are shortcuts to information when making decisions or encountering problems. Also there is more than one type of heuristic that we encounter. There are recurrence heuristics, heuristics based on past experiences and assumption of similar outcomes in scenarios that resemble one another. There are also representative heuristics that are based on a personally identified standard whereby you assume that you will enjoy things that you have enjoyed in the past or will trust the judgment and opinion of someone whose opinion you see as similar to your own. They can help us by allowing us to make smart, reasoned decisions against time or knowledge constraints, yet they can also prove to be a hindrance to us by making miss some potentially important information, by making us make poorly guided decisions based on past experience, and because they could be regarded as a form of bias in certain situations. They also serve to show us that our mind creates shortcuts that compare quite favorably to more complex systems and that our mind simplifies the processing of information, yet still works efficiently and provides good results.

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