Heuristic Decision Making
2010/12/02 by Gerd Gigerenzer, Wolfgang Gaissmaier · 66 citations
Decision Sciences · Social Sciences · #Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics #Complex Systems and Decision Making #Psychology of Social Influence
paper · doi:10.1146/annurev-psych-120709-145346
Abstract
As reflected in the amount of controversy, few areas in psychology have undergone such dramatic conceptual changes in the past decade as the emerging science of heuristics. Heuristics are efficient cognitive processes, conscious or unconscious, that ignore part of the information. Because using heuristics saves effort, the classical view has been that heuristic decisions imply greater errors than do "rational" decisions as defined by logic or statistical models. However, for many decisions, the assumptions of rational models are not met, and it is an empirical rather than an a priori issue how well cognitive heuristics function in an uncertain world. To answer both the descriptive question ("Which heuristics do people use in which situations?") and the prescriptive question ("When should people rely on a given heuristic rather than a complex strategy to make better judgments?"), formal models are indispensable. We review research that tests formal models of heuristic inference, including in business organizations, health care, and legal institutions. This research indicates that (a) individuals and organizations often rely on simple heuristics in an adaptive way, and (b) ignoring part of the information can lead to more accurate judgments than weighting and adding all information, for instance for low predictability and small samples. The big future challenge is to develop a systematic theory of the building blocks of heuristics as well as the core capacities and environmental structures these exploit.
Citations
Cited by
- Emotion and Decision Making
- Learning, Reward, and Decision Making
- Automatic Construction of Clinical Scoring Systems with LLM Agents
- Two kinds of bias
- Using Reinforcement Learning to Train Large Language Models to Explain Human Decisions
- Critical Ignoring as a Core Competence for Digital Citizens
- Analyzing consumer decision-making patterns in online restaurant selection: A study of information processing styles on yelp
- Beyond Identity: A Framework for the Study of Social Inequalities and Social Change
- Condorcet and Beyond: An Empirical Comparison of Voting Rules
- A characterization of lexicographic preferences
- Active inference and agency: optimal control without cost functions
- Measuring and Improving Behavioral Consistency in Large Language Models through Fact-Heuristic-Emotion State Enforcement
- Large Language Newsvendor: Decision Biases and Cognitive Mechanisms
- The Necessity of Imperfection:Reversing Model Collapse via Simulating Cognitive Boundedness
- Heuristics in Multi-Winner Approval Voting
- Science education in an age of misinformation
- Two graphs walk into a bar: Readout-based measurement reveals the Bar-Tip Limit error, a common, categorical misinterpretation of mean bar graphs
- Affective statistics: influence of visual designs on the interpretation of public health data
- A half-century reflection on pleasure vacation motives
- Maximizers Abandon More Before Decisions, Regret More After Decisions, and Re-Maximize More for Second-Time Decisions: Real-World Analysis of Online Consumer Behaviors
- Firms with Inconsistently Signed Earnings Surprises: Do Potential Investors Use a Counting Heuristic?
- Trapped in the Present: Poverty and the Undermining of Prospective Agency
- Helping Emigrants Flee a Political Crisis: How Antiwar Alignment Shapes the Aid Preferences of Wartime Russian Migrants
- The ‘healthy = sustainable’ heuristic: Effects of health and sustainability labels on perceived sustainability and healthiness of foods
- Applications of Psychological Science for Actionable Analytics
- Driving carbon offset donations: Evaluating the effectiveness of nudging, framing, and Nudge+ techniques
- Reimagining IR’s biomedical foundations: East Asian medicine and the need for cosmological plurality
- Factors influencing air passengers' intention to purchase voluntary carbon offsetting programs: The moderating role of environmental knowledge
- Importance of perceived naturalness for acceptance of food additives and cultured meat
- The Two Settings of Kind and Wicked Learning Environments
- Teachers as researchers and the issue of practicality
- Decision-Making Amid Information-Based Threats in Sociotechnical Systems: A Review
- The Pick-the-Winner-Picker Heuristic: Preference for Categorically Correct Forecasts
- Unfair behavioral public policies
- AI Leadership
- Adolescent risk-taking in the context of exploration and social influence
- Fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA): Guidelines for research practice in Information Systems and marketing
- The MAD Heuristic and the Nuclear Revolution
- Heuristics are Tools for Uncertainty
- Beyond "Hallucinations": A Framework for Stable Human-AI Reasoning
- Resource-rational analysis: Understanding human cognition as the optimal use of limited computational resources
- Heuristic Inference and the Left-Right
- Illusory Essences: A Bias Holding Back Theorizing in Psychological Science
- Debiasing the Influence of Demographic and Appearance Cues in Social Engineering via Role-Taking: Negative Results
- How experts’ own inconsistency relates to their confidence and between-expert disagreement
- Heuristics and consumer choice of plant-based substitutes for animal meat and milk
- Worth the effort? Compliance costs, heuristics, and perceived program accessibility
- Structuring Collective Action with LLM-Guided Evolution: From Ill-Structured Problems to Executable Heuristics
- Bayes or Pascal? The computations underlying motivated reasoning
- Why Humble Farmers May in Fact Grow Bigger Potatoes: A Call for Street-Smart Decision-Making in Sport
- How environmental features and perceptions influence the perceived risks and rewards of criminal opportunities
- Who benefits from debiasing?
- Regulating Misinformation: Political Irrationality as a Feasibility Constraint
- Decision authority and the returns to algorithms
- Optimizations for Decision Making and Planning in Description Logic Dynamic Knowledge Bases
- 'Alexa, Do You Know Anything?' The Impact of an Intelligent Assistant on Team Interactions and Creative Performance Under Time Scarcity
- Plasticity facilitates sustainable growth in the commons
- The role of conviction and narrative in decision-making under radical uncertainty
- Towards Cognitively-Faithful Decision-Making Models to Improve AI Alignment
- Consumers’ Risk Perception of Household Cleaning and Washing Products
- Meta-learning ecological priors from large language models explains human learning and decision making
- The Course Difficulty Analysis Cookbook
- Entropic Decision Making
- Generic-to-Specific Reasoning and Learning for Scalable Ad Hoc Teamwork
- A pragmatist contribution to 4E economics
- Nutri-Score, multiple traffic light and incomplete nutrition labelling on food packages: Effects on consumers’ accuracy in identifying healthier snack options
Related