What is Heuristic

• Heuristics are the strategies derived from previous experiences with

similar problems. These strategies depend on using readily
accessible, though loosely applicable, information to control 
problem solving in human beings, machines and abstract issues.
• A heuristic is a mental shortcut that allows people to solve problems and
make judgments quickly and efficiently.
• These rule-of-thumb strategies shorten decision-making time and allow
people to function without constantly stopping to think about their next
course of action.
• Heuristics are helpful in many situations, but they can also lead to 
cognitive biases.
 A Brief History of Heuristics

• It was during the 1950s that the Nobel-prize winning psychologist Herbert Simon suggested
that while people strive to make rational choices, human judgment is subject to cognitive
limitations. Purely rational decisions would involve weighing such factors 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.
• During the 1970s, psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman presented their
research on the 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 specific ways of thinking people rely on to simplify
the decision-making process.
 Common Uses
• In order to cope with the tremendous amount of information we encounter and to speed up the
decision-making process, the brain relies on these mental strategies to simplify things so we don't
have to spend endless amounts of time analyzing every detail.
• The world is full of information, yet our brains are only capable of processing a certain amount. If
you tried to analyze every single aspect of every situation or decision, you would never get anything
done.
• You probably make hundreds or even thousands of decisions every day. What should you have for
breakfast? What should you wear today? Should you drive or take the bus? Should you go out for
drinks later with your co-workers? The list of decisions you make each day is endless and varied.
Fortunately, heuristics allow you to make such decisions with relative ease without a great deal of
agonizing.
• For example, when trying to decide if you should drive or ride the bus to work, you might
suddenly remember that there is road construction along the bus route. You realize that this
might slow the bus and cause you to be late for work. So you leave earlier and drive to work on
an alternate route. Heuristics allow you to think through the possible outcomes quickly and
arrive at a solution.
 Common Uses
• Heuristics play important roles in both problem-solving and decision-making.
When we are trying to solve a problem or make a decision, we often turn to
these mental shortcuts when we need a quick solution. Psychologists have
suggested a few different theories for the reasons that we rely on heuristics.
• Attribute substitution: Theories suggest people substitute simpler but
related questions in place of more complex and difficult questions.
• Effort reduction: According to this theory, people utilize heuristics as a type
of cognitive laziness. Heuristics reduce the mental effort required to make
choices and decisions.
• Fast and frugal: Still other theories argue that heuristics are actually more
accurate than they are biased. In other words, we use heuristics because they
are fast and usually correct.
How Heuristics Can Lead to Bias
• Just because something has worked in the past does not mean that it
will work again, and relying on an existing heuristic can make it
difficult to see alternative solutions or come up with new ideas.
• While heuristics can speed up our problem and the decision-making
process, they can introduce errors. As you saw in the examples above,
heuristics can lead to inaccurate judgments about how common things
occur and about how representative certain things may be.
• 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.
Types of Heuristics

• Availability heuristic
• Representative heuristic
• Affect heuristic
Affect Heuristics

• 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.
Representative Heuristics

• The representativeness heuristic involves making a decision by comparing

the present situation to the most representative mental prototype. When you
are trying to decide if someone is trustworthy, you might compare aspects of
the individual to other mental examples you hold.
• A sweet older woman might remind you of your grandmother, so you might
immediately assume that she is kind, gentle and trustworthy.
• If you meet someone who is into yoga, spiritual healing and aromatherapy
you might immediately assume that she works as a holistic healer rather
than something like a school teacher or nurse. Because her traits match up to
your mental prototype of a holistic healer, the representativeness heuristic
causes you to classify her as more likely to work in that profession.
Availability Heuristics
 Availability Heuristics
• The availability heuristic, also known as availability bias, is a mental shortcut that
relies on immediate examples that come to a given person's mind when evaluating a
specific topic, concept, method or decision.
• The availability heuristic operates on the notion that if something can be recalled, it
must be important, or at least more important than alternative solutions which are
not as readily recalled. 
• The availability heuristic involves making decisions based upon how easy it is to
bring something to mind. When you are trying to make a decision, you might quickly
remember a number of relevant examples. Since these are more readily available in
your memory, you will likely judge these outcomes as being more common or
frequently-occurring.
• Subsequently, under the availability heuristic, people tend to heavily weigh their
judgments toward more recent information, making new opinions biased toward
that latest news.
 Availability Heuristics
• The availability of consequences associated with an action is positively
related to perceptions of the magnitude of the consequences of that
action.
• In other words, the easier it is to recall the consequences of something,
the greater those consequences are often perceived to be. Most notably,
people often rely on the content of their recall if its implications are not
called into question by the difficulty that they experience in bringing the
relevant material to mind
 How the Availability Heuristic Works

• When you are trying to make a decision, a number of related events or

situations might immediately spring to the forefront of your thoughts. As a
result, you might judge that those events are more frequent or probable than
others. You give greater credence to this information and tend to
overestimate the probability and likelihood of similar things happening in
the future.
• For example, after seeing several news reports about car thefts, you might 
make a judgment that vehicle theft is much more common than it really is
in your area. This type of availability heuristic can be helpful and important
in decision-making. When faced with a choice, we often lack the time or
resources to investigate in greater depth.
 How the Availability Heuristic Works
• This can be helpful when you are trying to make a decision or judgment
about the world around you. For example, would you say that there are more
words in the English language that begin with the letter t or with the letter k?
• You might try to answer this question by thinking of as many words as you
can that begin with each letter. Since you can think of more words that begin
with t, you might then believe that more words begin with this letter than
with k. In this instance, the availability heuristic has let you to a correct
answer.
• In another example, researchers have found that people who are more easily
able to recall seeing antidepressant advertising were also more likely to give
high estimates about the prevalence of depression.
 Examples of Availability Heuristics
• If you are thinking of flying and suddenly think of a number of recent airline accidents, you might feel like air
travel is too dangerous and decide to travel by car instead. Because those examples of air disasters came to mind so
easily, the availability heuristic leads you to think that plane crashes are more common than they really are.
• Investors may judge the quality of an investment based on information that was recently in the news, ignoring
other relevant facts (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974).
• There are numerous implications for availability bias for investors.
• A study by Karlsson, Loewenstein, and Ariely (2008) showed that people are more likely to purchase insurance to
protect themselves after a natural disaster they have just experienced than they are to purchase insurance on this
type of disaster before it happens.
• In the domain of health, it has been shown that drug advertising recall affects the perceived prevalence of
illnesses (An, 2008), while physicians’ recent experience of a condition increases the likelihood of subsequently
diagnosing the condition (Poses & Anthony, 1991).
• In consumer research, availability can play a role in various estimates, such as store prices (Ofir et al., 2008) or
product failure (Folkes, 1988).
 Examples of the Availability Heuristic
• Here are a few scenarios where this could play out in your day-to-day life.
• After reading an article about lottery winners, you start to overestimate your own
likelihood of winning the jackpot. You start spending more money than you should
each week on lottery tickets.
• After seeing news reports about people losing their jobs, you might start to believe
that you are in danger of being laid-off. You start lying awake in bed each night
worrying that you are about to be fired.
• After seeing news stories about high-profile child abductions, you begin to believe
that such tragedies are quite common. You refuse to let your child play outside by
herself and never let her leave your sight.
• After seeing several television programs on shark attacks, you start to think that
such incidences are relatively common. When you go on vacation, you refuse to swim
in the ocean because you believe the probability of a shark attack is high.
 Availability Heuristic and Decision Making
• Which job is more dangerous—being a police officer or a logger? While high
profile police shootings might lead to you think that cops have the most
dangerous job, statistics actually show that loggers are more likely to die on
the job than cops.
• When it comes to making this type of judgment about relative risk or danger,
our brains rely on a number of different strategies to make quick decisions.
This illustrates what is known as the availability heuristic, a mental shortcut
that helps you make fast, but sometimes incorrect, assessments.
• There are all kinds of mental shortcuts, but a common one involves relying
on information that comes to mind quickly. This is known as "availability." If
you can quickly think of multiple examples of something happening—such
as police shootings—you will believe that it is more common.
Common Pitfalls of Availability Heuristic

• Like other heuristics, the availability heuristic can be useful at times. However, it can lead
to problems and errors. Reports of child abductions, airplane accidents, and train
derailments often lead people to believe that such events are much more typical than they
truly are.
• For example, after you see a movie about a nuclear disaster, you might become convinced
that a nuclear war or accident is highly likely. After seeing a car overturned on the side of
the road, you might believe that your own likelihood of getting in an accident is very high.
• Plus, the longer you stay preoccupied with the event, the more available it will be in your
mind and the more probable you will believe it to be. The problem is that certain events
tend to stand out in our minds more than others.
• Excessive media coverage can cause this to happen, but sometimes the novelty or drama
surrounding an event can cause it to become more available in your memory. Because the
event is so unusual, it takes on greater significance, which leads you to incorrectly assume
that the event is much more common than it really is.
Summary
• There are 3 things you should know about the availability
heuristic:
1.We often misjudge the frequency and magnitude of events that have
happened recently.
2.This happens, in part, because of the limitations on memory.
3.We remember things better when they come in a vivid narrative.
References
• An, S. (2008). Antidepressant direct-to-consumer advertising and social perception of the
prevalence of depression: Application of the availability heuristic. Health Communication,
23(6), 499-505.
• Folkes, V. S. (1988). The availability heuristic and perceived risk. Journal of Consumer
research, 15(1), 13-23.
• Ofir, C., Raghubir, P., Brosh, G., Monroe, K. B., & Heiman, A. (2008). Memory-based store
price judgments: the role of knowledge and shopping experience. Journal of Retailing,
84(4), 414-423.
• Poses, R. M., & Anthony, M. (1991). Availability, wishful thinking, and physicians’ diagnostic
judgments for patients with suspected bacteremia. Medical Decision Making, 11(3), 159-
168.
• Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and
biases. Science (New Series), 185, 1124-1131.
• Types of Heuristic
https://clikfocus.com/blog/12-types-of-heuristics