Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Heuristics in Judgment and Decision-Making
Heuristics in Judgment and Decision-Making
Heuristics in Judgment and Decision-Making
1.1 Availability
Main article: Availability heuristic
In psychology, availability is the ease with which a particular idea can be brought to mind. When people estimate
how likely or how frequent an event is on the basis of
its availability, they are using the availability heuristic.[8]
When an infrequent event can be brought easily and
vividly to mind, this heuristic overestimates its likelihood.
For example, people overestimate their likelihood of dying in a dramatic event such as a tornado or terrorism.
Dramatic, violent deaths are usually more highly publicised and therefore have a higher availability.[9] On the
other hand, common but mundane events are hard to
bring to mind, so their likelihoods tend to be underestimated. These include deaths from suicides, strokes, and
diabetes. This heuristic is one of the reasons why people
are more easily swayed by a single, vivid story than by
a large body of statistical evidence.[10] It may also play a
role in the appeal of lotteries: to someone buying a ticket,
the well-publicised, jubilant winners are more available
than the millions of people who have won nothing.[9]
TYPES
Tversky and Kahnemans interpretation of these results The representativeness heuristic is also an explanation of
is that judgments of proportion are based on availability, how people judge cause and eect: when they make these
which is higher for the names of better-known people.[8] judgements on the basis of similarity, they are also said
In one experiment that occurred before the 1976 U.S. to be using the representativeness heuristic. This can lead
Presidential election, some participants were asked to to a bias, incorrectly nding causal relationships between
imagine Gerald Ford winning, while others did the same things that resemble one another and missing them when
for a Jimmy Carter victory. Each group subsequently the cause and eect are very dierent. Examples of this
viewed their allocated candidate as signicantly more include both the belief that emotionally relevant events
ought to have emotionally relevant causes, and magical
likely to win. The researchers found a similar eect
[15]
when students imagined a good or a bad season for a associative thinking.
college football team.[12] The eect of imagination on
subjective likelihood has been replicated by several other
1.2.1 Ignorance of base rates
researchers.[10]
A concepts availability can be aected by how recently
and how frequently it has been brought to mind. In one
study, subjects were given partial sentences to complete.
The words were selected to activate the concept either
of hostility or of kindness: a process known as priming.
They then had to interpret the behavior of a man described in a short, ambiguous story. Their interpretation
was biased towards the emotion they had been primed
with: the more priming, the greater the eect. A greater
interval between the initial task and the judgment decreased the eect.[13]
Tversky and Kahneman oered the availability heuristic
as an explanation for illusory correlations in which people wrongly judge two events to be associated with each
other. They explained that people judge correlation on
the basis of the ease of imagining or recalling the two
events together.[8][11]
1.2
Representativeness
1.3
3
in one study were asked whether Paul or Susan was
more likely to be assertive, given no other information
than their rst names. They rated Paul as more assertive,
apparently basing their judgment on a gender stereotype.
Another group, told that Pauls and Susans mothers each
commute to work in a bank, did not show this stereotype eect; they rated Paul and Susan as equally assertive.
The explanation is that the additional information about
Paul and Susan made them less representative of men or
women in general, and so the subjects expectations about
men and women had a weaker eect.[23] This means irrelative and undiagnostic information about certain issue
can make relative information less powerful to the issue
when people understand the phenomenon.[24]
4
they might be asked, Is the percentage of African countries which are members of the United Nations larger or
smaller than 65%?" They then tried to guess the true percentage. Their answers correlated well with the arbitrary
number they had been given.[27][28] Insucient adjustment from an anchor is not the only explanation for this
eect. An alternative theory is that people form their estimates on evidence which is selectively brought to mind
by the anchor.[29]
TYPES
1.3.1 Applications
1.5
Others
ple wrote down the last two digits of their social security
numbers. They were then asked to consider whether they
would pay this number of dollars for items whose value
they did not know, such as wine, chocolate, and computer
equipment. They then entered an auction to bid for these
items. Those with the highest two-digit numbers submitted bids that were many times higher than those with the
lowest numbers.[34][35] When a stack of soup cans in a
supermarket was labelled, Limit 12 per customer, the
label inuenced customers to buy more cans.[31] In another experiment, real estate agents appraised the value
of houses on the basis of a tour and extensive documentation. Dierent agents were shown dierent listing prices, and these aected their valuations. For one
house, the appraised value ranged from US$114,204 to
$128,754.[36][37]
Anchoring and adjustment has also been shown to aect
grades given to students. In one experiment, 48 teachers were given bundles of student essays, each of which
had to be graded and returned. They were also given a
ctional list of the students previous grades. The mean
of these grades aected the grades that teachers awarded
for the essay.[38]
One study showed that anchoring aected the sentences
in a ctional rape trial.[39] The subjects were trial judges
with, on average, more than fteen years of experience.
They read documents including witness testimony, expert
statements, the relevant penal code, and the nal pleas
from the prosecution and defence. The two conditions of
this experiment diered in just one respect: the prosecutor demanded a 34-month sentence in one condition and
12 months in the other; there was an eight-month dierence between the average sentences handed out in these
two conditions.[39] In a similar mock trial, the subjects
took the role of jurors in a civil case. They were either
asked to award damages in the range from $15 million
to $50 million or in the range from $50 million to $150
million. Although the facts of the case were the same
each time, jurors given the higher range decided on an
award that was about three times higher. This happened
even though the subjects were explicitly warned not to
treat the requests as evidence.[34]
5
tions are more persuasive than those framed in a purely
factual way.[41]
1.5 Others
2 Theories
There are competing theories of human judgment, which
dier on whether the use of heuristics is irrational. A
cognitive laziness approach argues that heuristics are inevitable shortcuts given the limitations of the human
brain. According to the natural assessments approach,
some complex calculations are already done rapidly and
automatically by the brain, and other judgments make use
of these processes rather than calculating from scratch.
This has led to a theory called attribute substitution,
which says that people often handle a complicated question by answering a dierent, related question, without
being aware that this is what they are doing.[42] A third
approach argues that heuristics perform just as well as
more complicated decision-making procedures, but more
quickly and with less information. This perspective emphasises the fast and frugal nature of heuristics.[43]
CONSEQUENCES
Gerd Gigerenzer and colleagues have argued that heuristics can be used to make judgments that are accurate
rather than biased. According to them, heuristics are fast
and frugal alternatives to more complicated procedures,
giving answers that are just as good.[48] The benets of
heuristic or 'less is more' decision-making strategies have
been observed in a variety of settings, ranging from food
[49]
[P]eople are not accustomed to thinking hard, and are consumption, to the stock market to online dating.
often content to trust a plausible judgment that comes to
mind.
that the strength of a stimulus (e.g. the brightness of a
light, the severity of a crime) is encoded by brain cells
in a way that is independent of modality. Kahneman and
Frederick built on this idea, arguing that the target attribute and heuristic attribute could be very dierent in
nature.[42]
3 Consequences
Kahneman and Frederick propose three conditions for atWarren Thorngate, an emeritus social psychologist, imtribute substitution:[42]
plemented 10 simple decision rules or heuristics in a simulation program as computer subroutines chose an alter1. The target attribute is relatively inaccessible.
native. He determined how often each heuristic selected
Substitution is not expected to take place in answer- alternatives with highest-through-lowest expected value
ing factual questions that can be retrieved directly in a series of randomly generated decision situations. He
from memory (What is your birthday?") or about found that most of the simulated heuristics selected alcurrent experience (Do you feel thirsty now?).
ternatives with highest expected value and almost never
selected alternatives with lowest expected value. More
2. An associated attribute is highly accessible.
This might be because it is evaluated automatically information about the simulation can be found in his Ef[50]
in normal perception or because it has been primed. cient decision heuristics article (1980).
For example, someone who has been thinking about
their love life and is then asked how happy they are
might substitute how happy they are with their love 3.2 Beautiful-is-familiar eect
life rather than other areas.
Psychologist Benot Monin reports a series of experi3. The substitution is not detected and corrected by the ments in which subjects, looking at photographs of faces,
reective system.
have to judge whether they have seen those faces before.
For example, when asked A bat and a ball together It is repeatedly found that attractive faces are more likely
cost $1.10. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. to be mistakenly labeled as familiar.[51] Monin interprets
How much does the ball cost?" many subjects in- this result in terms of attribute substitution. The heuristic
correctly answer $0.10.[46] An explanation in terms attribute in this case is a warm glow"; a positive feeling
7
towards someone that might either be due to their being
familiar or being attractive. This interpretation has been
criticised, because not all the variance in familiarity is accounted for by the attractiveness of the photograph.[44]
3.3
Legal scholar Cass Sunstein has argued that attribute substitution is pervasive when people reason about moral,
political or legal matters.[52] Given a dicult, novel problem in these areas, people search for a more familiar, related problem (a prototypical case) and apply its solution as the solution to the harder problem. According to
Sunstein, the opinions of trusted political or religious authorities can serve as heuristic attributes when people are
asked their own opinions on a matter. Another source of
heuristic attributes is emotion: peoples moral opinions
on sensitive subjects like sexuality and human cloning
may be driven by reactions such as disgust, rather than by
reasoned principles.[53] Sunstein has been challenged as
not providing enough evidence that attribute substitution,
rather than other processes, is at work in these cases.[44]
See also
Behavioral economics
Bounded rationality
Ecological Rationality
Cognitive miser
Adaptive Toolbox
[15] Nisbett, Richard E.; Ross, Lee (1980). Human inference: strategies and shortcomings of social judgment. Englewood Clis, NJ: Prentice-Hall. pp. 115118. ISBN
9780134450735.
Footnotes
Citations
CITATIONS
[35] George Loewenstein (2007), Exotic Preferences: Behavioral Economics and Human Motivation, Oxford University Press, pp. 284285, ISBN 9780199257072
[52] Sunstein, Cass R. (2005). Moral heuristics. Behavioral and Brain Sciences (Cambridge University Press) 28
(4): 531542. doi:10.1017/S0140525X05000099. ISSN
0140-525X. PMID 16209802.
[53] Sunstein, Cass R. (2009). Some Eects of Moral Indignation on Law. Vermont Law Review (Vermont Law
School) 33 (3): 405434. SSRN 1401432. Retrieved
2009-09-15.
References
Baron, Jonathan (2000), Thinking and deciding (3rd
ed.), New York: Cambridge University Press, ISBN
0521650305, OCLC 316403966
Gilovich, Thomas; Grin, Dale W. (2002), Introduction Heuristics and Biases: Then and Now,
in Gilovich, Thomas; Grin, Dale W.; Kahneman,
Daniel, Heuristics and biases: the psychology of intuitive judgement, Cambridge University Press, pp.
118, ISBN 9780521796798
Hardman, David (2009), Judgment and decision making: psychological perspectives, WileyBlackwell, ISBN 9781405123983
Hastie, Reid; Dawes, Robyn M. (29 September
2009), Rational Choice in an Uncertain World:
The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making,
SAGE, ISBN 9781412959032
Koehler, Derek J.; Harvey, Nigel (2004), Blackwell
handbook of judgment and decision making, WileyBlackwell, ISBN 9781405107464
Kunda, Ziva (1999), Social Cognition: Making Sense
of People, MIT Press, ISBN 978-0-262-61143-5,
OCLC 40618974
Mussweiler, Thomas; Englich, Birte; Strack, Fritz
(2004), Anchoring eect, in Pohl, Rdiger F.,
Cognitive Illusions: A Handbook on Fallacies and
Biases in Thinking, Judgement and Memory, Hove,
UK: Psychology Press, pp.
183200, ISBN
9781841693514, OCLC 55124398
Plous, Scott (1993), The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making, McGraw-Hill, ISBN
9780070504776, OCLC 26931106
Poundstone, William (2010), Priceless: the myth of
fair value (and how to take advantage of it), Hill and
Wang, ISBN 9780809094691
Reber, Rolf (2004), Availability, in Pohl, Rdiger F., Cognitive Illusions: A Handbook on Fallacies and Biases in Thinking, Judgement and Memory,
Hove, UK: Psychology Press, pp. 147163, ISBN
9781841693514, OCLC 55124398
Sutherland, Stuart (2007), Irrationality (2nd ed.),
London: Pinter and Martin, ISBN 9781905177073,
OCLC 72151566
Teigen, Karl Halvor (2004), Judgements by representativeness, in Pohl, Rdiger F., Cognitive Illusions: A Handbook on Fallacies and Biases in Thinking, Judgement and Memory, Hove, UK: Psychology
Press, pp. 165182, ISBN 9781841693514, OCLC
55124398
Tversky, Amos; Kahneman, Daniel (1974),
Judgments Under Uncertainty:
Heuristics
and Biases, Science 185 (4157): 11241131,
doi:10.1126/science.185.4157.1124,
PMID
17835457 reprinted in Daniel Kahneman, Paul
Slovic, Amos Tversky, ed. (1982). Judgment Under
Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press. pp. 320. ISBN
9780521284141.
Yudkowsky, Eliezer (2008), Cognitive biases potentially aecting judgment of global risks, in
Bostrom, Nick; irkovi, Milan M., Global catastrophic risks, Oxford University Press, pp. 91129,
ISBN 9780198570509
8 Further reading
Slovic, Paul; Melissa Finucane; Ellen Peters; Donald G. MacGregor (2002). The Aect Heuristic.
In Thomas Gilovich, Dale Grin, Daniel Kahneman. Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment. Cambridge University Press. pp.
397420. ISBN 9780521796798.
9 External links
Test Yourself: Decision Making and the Availability
Heuristic
10
10
10
10.1
10.2
Images
10.3
Content license