COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY-ASSIGNMENT

NAZREEN S M

AGS20MPSY011

MSc PSYCHOLOGY

Write briefly about heuristics. Its types and give examples of your choice.

A heuristic is a word from the Greek meaning "to discover." It is an approach to problem solving

that takes one's personal experience into account. Heuristics provide strategies to scrutinize a

limited number of signals and/or alternative choices in decision making. A heuristic is a mental

shortcut that helps us make decisions and judgments quickly without having to spend a lot of

time researching and analysing information. Heuristics diminish the work of retrieving and

storing information in memory; streamlining the decision-making process by reducing the

amount of integrated information necessary in making the choice or passing judgment.

However, while heuristics can speed up our problem and decision-making process, they can

introduce errors and biased judgments.

It was during the 1950s that the Nobel-prize winning economist and cognitive psychologist

Herbert Simon originally introduced the concept of heuristics when he suggested that while

people strive to make rational choices, human judgment is subject to cognitive limitations.

Purely rational decisions would involve weighing all alternatives such as potential costs against

possible benefits.

But people are limited by the amount of time they have to make a choice as well as the amount

of information we have at our disposal. Other factors such as overall intelligence and accuracy of

perceptions also influence the decision-making process.

on cognitive biases. They proposed that these biases influence how people think and the

judgments people make.

As a result of these limitations, we are forced to rely on mental shortcuts to help us make sense

of the world. Simon's research demonstrated that humans were limited in their ability to make

rational decisions, but it was Tversky and Kahneman's work that introduced the study of

heuristics and the specific ways of thinking that people rely on to simplify the decision-making

process.

1.Representative Heuristics

The Representative Heuristics is a mental shortcut that helps us make a decision by comparing

information to our mental prototypes or stereotypes. It is the tendency to judge the frequency or

likelihood of an event by the extent to which it resembles the typical case. Heavy reliance on this

leads people to ignore other factors that heavily influence the actual frequencies and likelihoods,

such as rules of chance, independence, and norms.

The representativeness heuristic is used when people judge the probability that an object or event

A belongs to a class or process B. Suppose you are given the description of an individual and

estimate the probability he/ she has a certain occupation. You would probably estimate that

probability in terms of the similarity between the individual’s description and your stereotype of

that occupation.

Further evidence indicating use of the representativeness heuristic was reported by Tversky and

Kahneman (1983). They studied the conjunction fallacy, which is the mistaken belief that the

conjunction or combination of two events (A and B) is more likely than one of the two events on
its own. This fallacy seems to involve the representativeness heuristic.Example is the so-called

gambler’s fallacy, the belief that runs in good and bad luck can occur. For example, if a coin toss

turns up ‘heads’ multiple times in a row, many people think that ‘tails’ is a more likely

occurrence in the next toss to “even things out”, even though each toss is an independent event

not connected to the toss before or after it.

This heuristic, like others, saves us time and energy. We make a snap decision and assumption

without thinking very much. Unfortunately, many examples of the representativeness heuristic

involve succumbing to stereotypes or relying on information patterns, as in the sequence of

heads and tails.

2, Availability heuristic

This is the tendency to judge the frequency or likelihood of an event by the ease with which

relevant instances come to mind. It operates on the assumption that if something can be recalled,

it must be important or more important than alternative solutions that are not as readily recalled.

A decision maker relies upon knowledge that is readily available rather than examine other

alternatives or procedures; as a result, individuals tend to weigh their judgments toward more

recent information, making new opinions biased toward that latest news.

In other words, the easier it is to recall the consequences of something, the greater those

consequences are often perceived to be.

This is inaccurate because our recall of facts and events is distorted by the vividness of

information, the number of repetitions we are exposed to through advertisements on radio and

television, and their subsequent familiarity.

Availability provides a mechanism by which occurrences of extreme utility (or disutility) may

appear more likely than they actually are.

judge the relative likelihood of different causes of death. Those causes of death attracting

considerable publicity (e.g., murder) were judged more likely than those that do not (e.g.,

suicide), even when the opposite is the case. These findings suggest that people used the

availability heuristic. Hertwig, Pachur, and Kurzenhäuser (2005) argued that we can interpret

Lichtenstein et al.’s (1978) findings in two ways. We can distinguish between two different

mechanisms associated with use of the availability heuristic.

First, there is the availability-by-recall mechanism: this is based on the number of people that an

individual recalls having died from a given risk (e.g., a specific disease).

Second, there is the fl uency mechanism: this involves judging the number of deaths from a

given risk by deciding how easy it would be to bring relevant instances to mind but without

retrieving them.

Hertwig, Pachur, and Kurzenhäuser (2005) used a task in which pairs of risks were presented and

participants judged which claims more lives each year. Performance on this task was predicted

moderately well by both mechanisms. Some individuals apparently used the availability by-

recall mechanism most of the time, whereas others used it more sparingly. Oppenheimer (2004)

provided convincing evidence that we do not always use the availability heuristic. He presented

American participants with pairs of names (one famous, one non-famous), and asked them to

indicate which surname was more common in the United States.

For example, one pair consisted of the names “Bush” and “Stevenson” – which name do you

think is more common? Here is another one: which surname is more common: “Clinton” or

“Woodall”? If participants had used the availability heuristic, they would have said “Bush” and

“Clinton”. In fact, however, only 12% said Bush and 30% Clinton. They were correct to avoid
these famous names because the non famous name is slightly more common. How did

participants make their judgements in the above study? According to Oppenheimer

(p. 100), “People not only spontaneously recognize when familiarity of stimuli comes from

sources other than frequency (e.g., fame), but also overcorrect

1.Recognition heuristic

One strategy that uses recognition to make inferences from memory about the environment is

what Goldstein and Gigerenzer (1999, 2002) called the recognition heuristic.

The recognition heuristic typically operates when you must compare the relative frequency of

two categories; if you recognize one category, but not the other, you conclude that the

recognized category has the higher frequency.

“If one of two objects is recognized and the other is not, infer that the recognized object has the

higher value with respect to the criterion”

2.The ‘anchor and adjust’ heuristic

This is the tendency to judge the frequency or likelihood of an event by using a starting point

called an anchor and then making adjustments up or down. When people make quantitative

estimates, their estimates may be heavily influenced by previous values of the item. For example,

it is not an accident that a used car salesman always starts negotiating with a high price and then

works down. The salesman is trying to get the consumer anchored on the high price so that when

he offers a lower price, the consumer will estimate that the lower price represents a good value.

This is also a commonly used heuristic in the property market. Sellers may see more value in

their homes than is actually there, and ask for a price so high that no buyer is going to be

interested. In these situations, the asking price is not a good anchor, but it may still play a role in

helping buyers decide how much to offer.

estimates, which are biased toward the initial value or number.

3.Affect Heuristic

The affect heuristic involves making choices that are influenced by the emotions that an

individual is experiencing at that moment. For example, research has shown that people are more

likely to see decisions as having benefits and lower risks when they are in a positive mood.

Negative emotions, on the other hand, lead people to focus on the potential downsides of a

decision rather than the possible benefits.

Heuristics can also contribute to things such as stereotypes and prejudice. Because people use

mental shortcuts to classify and categorize people, they often overlook more relevant information

and create stereotyped categorizations that are not in tune with reality.

References

 Cognitive Psychology A Student's Handbook - Michael Eysenck

 Cognitive Psychology ( PDFDrive ) - Nick Braisby and Angus Gellatly

 Heuristics and Biases-The Science of Decision Making , retrieved from,

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281232107

 Heuristics and Cognitive Biases, retrieved from, https://www.verywellmind.com/what-

is-a-heuristic-2795235