Introduction
Herbert Simon, a cognitive psychologist, elucidates that thinking and decision making is an integral part of human life. Daily, people make decisions and judgments that are both short and long-term (Hertwig & Hoffrage, 2013). Cognitive psychologists have documented heuristics as simple and efficient rules and regulations that are often employed by people in judgment and decision making. They constitute of mental shortcuts that are ingrained in emphasizing and considering an aspect of a complex problem while ignoring others. Heuristics have been cited to affect people's choices by enabling quick judgment and decision-making in vast situations, for instance, what means of transport to take or what type food to buy in a restaurant.
Thus, heuristics help people make fast decisions and judgments without taking a lot of time and resources to research and analyze the information. Though heuristics has been credited for its easy computations, people overestimate the ability of heuristics to accurately predict events; consequently, it can result into cognitive biases (Plessner & Betsch, 2012).An in-depth examination of the heuristic constitutes the scope of this study. Firstly, this study provides an example of the availability heuristic and how it affects individual thinking or decision making. A description of the situation and the thought on why the situation will be influenced by the availability heuristic will be given. Secondly, an instance on how thinking has been influenced by the representativeness heuristic will also be examined.
Availability Heuristic
Availability heuristic, as described by cognitive psychologists, is a mental shortcut that enables people to make decisions on the basis of immediate examples that comes to one’s mind (Plessner & Betsch, 2012). People often rely on the easiness of thinking about examples and situations when making decisions or judgments. In addition, availability heuristic is ingrained on the easiness with which similar instances come to one’s mind. In a situation of decision making, many related examples immediately come in one’s thoughts. Based on the events, one is likely to judge and tend to overestimate the occurrence and probability of similar scenarios taking place in future.
For instance, after watching the news for many days about car theft in one's area of residence, one is likely to make a judgment that car theft is much more widespread than it really is in that area. Thus, when this individual is faced with an immediate decision about the safety of his car, immediate examples watched in the news will quickly come to his mind and he will conclude that his car is not safe. As elucidated by Hertwig & Hoffrage (2013), often availability heuristic helps people in decision-making in instances where they time or resources are insufficient to investigate a matter of concern in depth to immediately make a decision.
Representativeness Heuristic
The pioneers of representativeness heuristic, Tversky and Kahneman, in their description of 1973 portend that representativeness heuristic constitutes the degree to which an occurrence is similar in characteristics to the parent population in addition to reflecting the salient attributes of its generation process (Plessner & Betsch, 2012). The representative is the prototype that is used in the comparison, for instance, like things are grouped together. In addition, representativeness heuristic is perceived to be based on the people’s perception with regard to cause and effect.
Consequently, human thinking has been influenced and shaped by the representativeness heuristic, for example, over a century it has been believed that people develop ulcers because of stress. In reality, the condition is caused by bacteria but the thinking of linking stress with ulcers has been influenced and shaped by representativeness heuristic. Representativeness heuristic as documented by Hertwig & Hoffrage (2013)may result in bias and incorrectly associating cause-effect relationships.
References
Hertwig, R, & Hoffrage, U. (2013). Simple heuristics in the social world. New York: Oxford University Press.
Plessner, H., & Betsch, T. (2012). Intuition in judgment and decision-making process. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
