Heuristics: Amos Tversky And Daniel Kahneman

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a series of papers by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman revolutionized academic research on human judgment by adopting cognitive short cuts, called heuristics, which reduce complex problem solving to simpler judgmental operations (Hogg & Vaughan, 2011). In this paper, there will three prominent types of heuristic that will be explored in depth. There are representative heuristic, availability heuristic and anchoring and adjustment heuristic. This paper will also deliberate the benefits and criticism of using the various heuristic.

Firstly, representative heuristic is a mental shortcut through which people classify something as belonging to a certain category to the extent that it is similar to a typical case from that category (Hogg & Vaughan, 2011). This mental shortcut can often help with overcoming analysis paralysis; thanks to our mind’s automatic information processing, intuitive judgements are instantaneous. Consequently representativeness here has more to do with memory of a prototype, stereotype or average (Hogg & Vaughan, 2011). According to an example by Indian Trail High School (n.d), a stranger tells you about a person who is short, slim, likes to read poetry, and then asks you to guess whether this person is more likely to be a professor of classics at an

This most common critique of the research on heuristics and biases is that it offers an exaggeratedly pessimistic assessment of the average person’s ability to make thorough and effective judgments. Critics such as Ortmann & Hertwig (2000) see the heuristics and biases program as belittling “human decision makers as systematically flawed bumblers” (as cited in Gilovich & Griffin, 2002, p. 8) due to the fact that “actual human reasoning has been described as ‘biased,’ ‘fallacious,’ or ‘indefensible’” (Gigerenzer, 1991a, p. 259, as cited in Gilovich & Griffin, 2002, p.