Abstract
Heuristics are strategies that allow individuals to reach a conclusion for themselves or to fill a gap when information is not available. In the past 25 years or so, the empirical study of heuristics showed that these strategies are ingrained in the functioning of the human brain and central to processes like problem-solving and judgment and decision-making. As a result, heuristics have become a fundamental feature of psychological theories and challenge the traditional vision of analytical, rational thinking and information processing that was proposed in other disciplines (e.g., economics). Past research has shown that there is an array of heuristics that individuals employ to cope with the complexity of the environment in which they are living. These strategies allow to make quick evaluations of events and stimuli that can inform decision-makers about what to do when the outcomes are uncertain, information is incomplete, or time is constrained. Heuristics are also instrumental to save cognitive resources by engaging in a tradeoff between the quality and the effort required to make a decision. A consequence is that heuristics can bias thinking and reasoning, although they are also instrumental to allow the human brain to react with high flexibility and speed. The debate is still open on whether the impact of heuristics on our reasoning is positive or not, and a wide range of debiasing techniques has been developed over the years (228).
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Rubaltelli, E. (2020). Heuristics. In: The Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98390-5_1-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98390-5_1-1
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