Have you ever heard the word heuristics
before? No, well me neither until this year and it turns out we use them every
day and this is just the fancy word which simply means a “rule of thumb” that
provides a best guess solution to a problem. Now that you know what a heuristic
is, you’ll realize that you do this every day. In class we talked about three
of the most commonly known ones, which are: the gambler’s fallacy, availability
heuristic, and anchoring and adjustment heuristic. Let’s do a quick rundown of
each of these before we move on to another one.
To explain gambler’s fallacy, let’s use the example
of flipping a coin and getting heads or tails. Say you flip it eight times, the
first one is tails, and then you get tails six times in a row, what will the eighth
flip be? Odds are you said heads and your reason is because it was “due to land
on heads.” That right there is the gambler’s fallacy. We have a 50/50 chance of
getting heads or tails, so after a long run of getting tails you’re more likely
to believe that you’ll get heads next even though it’s always a 50/50 chance.
To explain the availability heuristic,
let’s think about a few things. Are you more likely to die from a car accident
or stomach cancer? Most people will say car accident, but in all reality more
people die from stomach cancer. We say car accident over stomach cancer because
we hear about people dying from car accidents more often than we hear about
people dying from stomach cancer, so this information is readily available to
us. The things that we hear about more on a daily basis are the things that
will come to our minds first. Another example of this is do more words start
with the letter K or have K as the third letter? Believe it or not more words have
K as the third letter than the first, so why are we more likely to say that
there are more words that start with K? The answer is simply because it’s
easier for us to think of words that start with K rather than words that have
it as its third letter, but as soon as someone starts saying words that have K
as the third letter you’ll think of a bunch of them (i.e. bike, like, lake,
cake, etc.).
The anchoring
and adjustment heuristic is when we are given certain information and then
adjust it up or down. So someone asked you, are there more than 25 people in
your psychology class without counting? You look and see there’s more and then
they ask you how many people are there, most people will say 30 and they got to
this by doing 25 people, plus 5 is 30. Or usually the chips you buy from the
store are on sale for $2.50 but this week they’re being sold for $3.25. This is
also an example of this heuristic because the store took the usual sale price
and increased it from $2.50 to $3.00. They adjusted it from low to high which
is a common practice for stores to do. Now that we understand these three
heuristics let’s move on to another kind.
A lesser known heuristic is the
simulation heuristic, which is “a
more specific form of the availability heuristic that explains why people
experience regret and use counterfactual thinking. Simply stated the simulation
heuristic pertains to how likely one thinks an outcome will occur”
(Psychowiki.com). “The mental processes, by
which people construct scenarios, or examples, resemble the running of the
simulation model. Mental simulation appears to be used to make predictions,
assess probabilities and evaluate casual statements. A particular form of
simulation, which concerns the mental undoing of certain events, plays an
important role in the analysis of regret and close calls. Two rules of mental
undoing are proposed. According to the downhill rule, people undo events by
removing surprising or unexpected occurrences. According to the focus rule,
people manipulate the entities on which they focus” (Kahneman & Tversky 1981).
There are different
reasons for when people will use this heuristic. The first is when someone has
no previous information about something and they have to make a general
prediction. So for example, when two people meet for the first time, neither
one of them knows anything about the other so they make basic predictions about
each other. When it comes to assessing probabilities’ using this heuristic, an
example would be what would have happened if Lincoln wasn’t shot by John Wilkes
Booth, how would history have been different? Or what will happen if you don’t
study for your cognitive psychology final? Finally an example of evaluating
casual statements would be something like: did studying for an hour cause you
to get an 85% on your test or was the test just very easy? So as you can see we
do use this heuristic in our lives when it comes to certain things. The other
three heuristics mentioned are the better known ones and the ones that are used
more often, but all of them are valuable when it comes to us making decisions
and guesses about things.
Cognitive Psychology Connecting
mind, research, and everyday experiences by E. Bruce
Goldstein
Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1981). The simulation heuristic (No. TR-5). STANFORD UNIV CA DEPT OF
PSYCHOLOGY.
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