Heuristics in judgment and decision making

In psychology, heuristics are simple, efficient rules which people often use to form judgments and make decisions. They are mental shortcuts that usually involve focusing on one aspect of a complex problem and ignoring others. These rules work well under most circumstances, but they can lead to systematic deviations from logic, probability or rational choice theory. The resulting errors are called "cognitive biases" and many different types have been documented. These have been shown to affect people's choices in situations like valuing a house, deciding the outcome of a legal case, or making an investment decision. Heuristics usually govern automatic, intuitive judgments but can also be used as deliberate mental strategies when working from limited information.

Cognitive scientist Herbert A. Simon originally proposed that human judgments are limited by available information, time contraints, and cognative limitations, calling this bounded rationality. In the early 1970s, psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman demonstrated three heuristics that underlie a wide range of intuitive judgments. These findings set in motion the heuristics and biases research program, which studies how people make real-world judgments and the conditions under which those judgments are unreliable. This research challenged the idea that human beings are rational actors, but provided a theory of information processing to explain how people make estimates or choices. This research, which first gained worldwide attention in 1974 with the Science paper "Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases", has guided almost all current theories of decision-making, and although the originally proposed heuristics have been challenged in the further debate, this research program has changed the field by permanently setting the research questions.

This heuristics-and-biases tradition has been criticised by Gerd Gigerenzer and others for being too focused on how heuristics lead to errors. The critics argue that heuristics can be seen as rational in an underlying sense. According to this perspective, heuristics are good enough for most purposes without being too demanding on the brain's resources. Another theoretical perspective sees heuristics as fully rational in that they are rapid, can be made without full information and can be as accurate as more complicated procedures. By understanding the role of heuristics in human psychology, marketers and other persuaders can influence decisions, such as the prices people pay for goods or the quantity they buy.

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