Heuristic refers to experience-based techniques for problem solving, learning, and discovery
that give a solution which is not guaranteed to be optimal. Where the exhaustive search
is impractical, heuristic methods are used to speed up the process of finding a satisfactory
solution via mental shortcuts to ease the cognitive load of making a decision. Examples
of this method include using a rule of thumb, an educated guess, an intuitive judgment,
stereotyping, or common sense. In more precise terms, heuristics are strategies
using readily accessible, though loosely applicable, information to control problem solving in
human beings and machines.
Example The most fundamental heuristic is trial and
error, which can be used in everything from matching nuts and bolts to finding the values
of variables in algebra problems. Here are a few other commonly used heuristics,
from George Pólya's 1945 book, How to Solve It:
If you are having difficulty understanding a problem, try drawing a picture.
If you can't find a solution, try assuming that you have a solution and seeing what you
can derive from that. If the problem is abstract, try examining
a concrete example. Try solving a more general problem first.
Psychology
In psychology, heuristics are simple, efficient rules, learned or hard-coded by evolutionary
processes, that have been proposed to explain how people make decisions, come to judgments,
and solve problems typically when facing complex problems or incomplete information. Researchers
test if people use those rules with various methods. These rules work well under most
circumstances, but in certain cases lead to systematic errors or cognitive biases.
Although much of the work of discovering heuristics in human decision-makers was done by the Israeli
psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, the concept was originally introduced by Nobel
laureate Herbert A. Simon. Simon's original, primary object of research was problem solving
which showed that we operate within what he calls bounded rationality. He coined the term
"satisficing", which denotes the situation where people seek solutions or accept choices
or judgments that are "good enough" for their purposes, but could be optimized.
Gerd Gigerenzer focused on the "fast and frugal" properties of heuristics, i.e., using heuristics
in a way that is principally accurate and thus eliminating most cognitive bias. From
one particular batch of research, Gigerenzer and Wolfgang Gaissmaier found that both individuals
and organizations rely on heuristics in an adaptive way. They also found that ignoring
part of the information [with a decision], rather than weighing all the options, can
actually lead to more accurate decisions. Heuristics, through greater refinement and
research, have begun to be applied to other theories, or be explained by them. For example:
the Cognitive-Experiential Self-Theory also an adaptive view of heuristic processing.
CEST breaks down two systems that process information. At some times, roughly speaking,
individuals consider issues rationally, systematically, logically, deliberately, effortfully, and
verbally. On other occasions, individuals consider issues intuitively, effortlessly,
globally, and emotionally. From this perspective, heuristics are part of a larger experiential
processing system that is often adaptive, but vulnerable to error in situations that
require logical analysis. In 2002, Daniel Kahneman and Shane Frederick
proposed that cognitive heuristics work by a process called attribute substitution, which
happens without conscious awareness. According to this theory, when somebody makes a judgment
that is computationally complex, a rather easier calculated "heuristic attribute" is
substituted. In effect, a cognitively difficult problem is dealt with by answering a rather
simpler problem, without being aware of this happening. This theory explains cases where
judgments fail to show regression toward the mean. Heuristics can be considered to reduce
the complexity of clinical judgements in healthcare. Theorized psychological heuristics
Well known Anchoring and adjustment – Describes the
common human tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information offered
when making decisions. For example, in a study done with children, the children were told
to estimate the number of jellybeans in a jar. Groups of children were given either
a high or low "base" number. Children estimated the number of jellybeans to be closer to the
anchor number that they were given. Availability heuristic – A mental shortcut
that occurs when people make judgments about the probability of events by the ease with
which examples come to mind. For example, in a 1973 Tversky & Kahneman experiment, the
majority of participants reported that there were more words in the English language that
start with the letter K than for which K was the third letter. There are actually twice
as many words in the English Language that have K as the third letter than start with
K, but words that start with K are much easier to recall and bring to mind.
Representativeness heuristic – A mental shortcut used when making judgments about
the probability of an event under uncertainty. Or, judging a situation based on how similar
the prospects are to the prototypes the person holds in his or her mind. For example, in
a 1982 Tversky and Kahneman experiment, participants were given a description of a woman named
Linda. Based on the description, it was likely that Linda was a feminist. 80-90% of participants
responded that it was also more likely for Linda to be a feminist and a bank teller than
just a bank teller. The likelihood of two events cannot be greater than that of either
of the two events individually. For this reason, the Representativeness Heuristic is exemplary
of the Conjunction Fallacy. Naïve diversification – When asked to make
several choices at once, people tend to diversify more than when making the same type of decision
sequentially. Escalation of commitment – Describes the
phenomenon where people justify increased investment in a decision, based on the cumulative
prior investment, despite new evidence suggesting that the cost, starting today, of continuing
the decision outweighs the expected benefit. Familiarity heuristic – A mental shortcut
applied to various situations in which individuals assume that the circumstances underlying the
past behavior still hold true for the present situation and that the past behavior thus
can be correctly applied to the new situation. Especially prevalent when the individual experiences
a high cognitive load. Lesser known
Affect heuristic Contagion heuristic
Effort heuristic Fluency heuristic
Gaze heuristic Peak-end rule
Recognition heuristic Scarcity heuristic
Similarity heuristic Simulation heuristic
Social proof Take-the-best heuristic
Cognitive maps Heuristics were also found to be used in the
manipulation and creation of cognitive maps. Cognitive maps are internal representations
of our physical environment, particularly associated with spatial relationships. These
internal representations of our environment are used as memory as a guide in our external
environment. It was found that when questioned about maps imaging, distancing, and etc.,
people commonly made distortions to images. These distortions took shape in the regularization
of images. There are several ways that humans form and
use cognitive maps. Visual intake is a key part of mapping. The first is by using landmarks.
This is where a person uses a mental image to estimate a relationship, usually distance,
between two objects. Second, is route-road knowledge, and this is generally developed
after a person has performed a task and is relaying the information of that task to another
person. Third, is survey. A person estimates a distance based on a mental image that, to
them, might appear like an actual map. This image is generally created when a person's
brain begins making image corrections. These are presented in five ways: 1. Right-angle
bias is when a person straightens out an image, like mapping an intersection, and begins to
give everything 90-degree angles, when in reality it may not be that way. 2. Symmetry
heuristic is when people tend to think of shapes, or buildings, as being more symmetrical
than they really are. 3. Rotation heuristic is when a person takes a naturally distorted
image and straightens it out for their mental image. 4. Alignment heuristic is similar to
the previous, where people align objects mentally to make them straighter than they really are.
5. Relative-position heuristic people do not accurately distance landmarks in their mental
image based on how well they remember that particular item.
Another method of creating cognitive maps is by means of auditory intake based on verbal
descriptions. Using the mapping based from a person's visual intake, another person can
create a mental image, such as directions to a certain location.
Philosophy "Heuristic device" is used when an entity
X exists to enable understanding of, or knowledge concerning, some other entity Y. A good example
is a model that, as it is never identical with what it models, is a heuristic device
to enable understanding of what it models. Stories, metaphors, etc., can also be termed
heuristic in that sense. A classic example is the notion of utopia as described in Plato's
best-known work, The Republic. This means that the "ideal city" as depicted in The Republic
is not given as something to be pursued, or to present an orientation-point for development;
rather, it shows how things would have to be connected, and how one thing would lead
to another, if one would opt for certain principles and carry them through rigorously.
"Heuristic" is also often used as a noun to describe a rule-of-thumb, procedure, or method.
Philosophers of science have emphasized the importance of heuristics in creative thought
and constructing scientific theories. Law
In legal theory, especially in the theory of law and economics, heuristics are used
in the law when case-by-case analysis would be impractical, insofar as "practicality"
is defined by the interests of a governing body.
The present securities regulation regime largely assumes that all investors act as perfectly,
rational persons. In truth, actual investors face cognitive limitations from biases, heuristics,
and framing effects. For instance, in all states in the United
States the legal drinking age for unsupervised persons is 21 years, because it is argued
that people need to be mature enough to make decisions involving the risks of alcohol consumption.
However, assuming people mature at different rates, the specific age of 21 would be too
late for some and too early for others. In this case, the somewhat arbitrary deadline
is used because it is impossible or impractical to tell whether an individual is sufficiently
mature for society to trust them with that kind of responsibility. Some proposed changes,
however, have included the completion of an alcohol education course rather than the attainment
of 21 years of age as the criterion for legal alcohol possession. This would put youth alcohol
policy more on a case-by-case basis and less on a heuristic one, since the completion of
such a course would presumably be voluntary and not uniform across the population.
The same reasoning applies to patent law. Patents are justified on the grounds that
inventors must be protected so they have incentive to invent. It is therefore argued that it
is in society's best interest that inventors receive a temporary government-granted monopoly
on their idea, so that they can recoup investment costs and make economic profit for a limited
period. In the United States, the length of this temporary monopoly is 20 years from the
date the application for patent was filed, though the monopoly does not actually begin
until the application has matured into a patent. However, like the drinking-age problem above,
the specific length of time would need to be different for every product to be efficient.
A 20-year term is used because it is difficult to tell what the number should be for any
individual patent. More recently, some, including University of North Dakota law professor Eric
E. Johnson, have argued that patents in different kinds of industries–such as software patents–should
be protected for different lengths of time. Stereotyping
Stereotyping is a type of heuristic that all people use to form opinions or make judgments
about things they have never seen or experienced. They work as a mental shortcut to assess everything
from the social status of a person based on their actions to assumptions that a plant
that is tall has a trunk and leaves is a tree even though the person making the evaluation
has never seen that particular type of tree before.
Stereotypes as described by Lippman are the pictures we have in our heads which are built
around experiences as well as what we are told about the world.
See also Algorithm
Behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman
Erudition Failure mode and effects analysis
List of biases in judgment and decision making Neuroheuristics
Problem solving Social heuristics
References
Further reading How To Solve It: Modern Heuristics, Zbigniew
Michalewicz and David B. Fogel, Springer Verlag, 2000. ISBN 3-540-66061-5
Russell, Stuart J.; Norvig, Peter, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, Upper Saddle
River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, ISBN 0-13-790395-2 The Problem of Thinking Too Much, 2002-12-11,
Persi Diaconis External links