Heuristics
Role of heuristics in social cognition
Almost every day, people are intended to make choices or judgments regarding
almost everything they encounter and provide feedback. And often people do so even
in the presence of limited information. Since we have limited capability to inculcate all
the cognitions, w[e often try to reduce the effort we spend on social cognition. people
tend to rely on automatic processing.
Automatic processing is not always a smart choice but it makes various decisions and
reasoning on the basis of various shortcuts. These mental shortcuts are named
heuristics which makes quick estimate of the situation and provides with a conclusion
in a relatively effortless manner
What are heuristics?
Heuristics are mental shortcuts that provide quick estimates about the likelihood of
certain events. It is shortcut for problem solving that reduces complex or ambiguous
information to more simple judgemental operations.
They are mental rules of thumb that help people use reason and past experience to
solve problems efficiently.
Commonly used to simplify problems and avoid cognitive overload, heuristics are part
of how the human brain evolved and is wired, allowing individuals to quickly reach
reasonable conclusions or solutions to complex problems.
Efficiency pressures often lead people to fall back on their prior schemas or scripts for
events to manage the rapid and complex flow of information in the social world.
We still need to a way to get from the information we see around us to schemas. That
is we need to know which of these complex structures in the long term memory are
appropriate for understanding any given social situation. This complex task is solved
by the use of heuristics.
HISTORY OF HEURISTICS
Nobel-prize winning economist and cognitive psychologist Herbert Simon originally
introduced the concept of heuristics in psychology in the 1950s.
Simon was a Nobel laureate and economist who suggested that rational decision-
making has limitations. He hypothesized that the human brain uses mental shortcuts,
or heuristics, to help people make decisions quickly without analyzing all the available
information.
In the 1970s, psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman presented their
research on cognitive biases. They proposed that these biases influence how people
think and make judgments.
Common types of heuristics:
1. Representativeness Heuristics
A mental rule of thumb suggesting that the more closely an event or object
resembles typical examples of some concept or category, the more likely it is to
belong to that concept or category.
Although making judgments or decisions on the basis of representativeness saves
cognitive effort, it can also be a source of serious errors. In particular, use of this
heuristic sometimes causes us to ignore forms of information that could potentially
prove very helpful.
One reason that people misguidedly use the representativeness heuristic is be cause
they fail to understand the concept of base rates. Base rate refers to the prev alence
of an event or characteristic within its population of events or characteristics.
For example, suppose a doctor was told that a 10-year-old boy was suffering chest
pains. The doctor would be much less likely to worry about an incipient heart attack
than if the doctor were told that a 60-year-old man had the identical symptom. Why?
Because the base rate of heart attacks is much higher in 60 year-old men than in 10-
year-old boys.
2. Availability heuristic
This shortcut, which is designed to save us mental effort, suggests that the easier it is
to bring some thing to mind, the more frequent or important it is. This shortcut makes
good sense in many cases, because events or objects that are common are usually
easier to think of than ones that are less common.
Study by Tversky and Kahneman (1974): They presented participants with lists of and
then asked whether the lists contained more men’s or women’s names. Although the
numbers of male and female names were equal, nearly 80 percent of the participants
reported that women’s names appeared more frequently. Why? Because the women
named in the lists were more famous, so their names were more read ily remembered
and brought to mind.
But using this heuristic too tends to make us at fault. For example, if you are a student
of psychology majors, it is obvious that you come to know about many people taking
psychology and hence would answer that many people tend to take so. In contrast,
another student who has physics as his major may not be familiar with people taking
psychology, therefore he cannot bring the instances of people taking psychology and
would underestimate the likelihood of the event to occur.
3. Anchoring and Adjustment heuristic
A cognitive rule of thumb for decision making in which existing information is
accepted as a reference point but then adjusted in light of various factors.
When people are attempting to form judgements from ambiguous information, they
will often reduce ambiguity by starting with the beginning reference point, or anchor
and then adjusting it.
This heuristic is a mental shortcut often used in decision-making under uncertainty,
where the initial anchor significantly influences the perception of value, quantity, or
probability.
This heuristic is prevalent in various domains. In marketing and retail, businesses
exploit anchoring by presenting higher prices first, such as displaying the “original
price” next to the discounted price. Consumers are more likely to perceive the
discounted price as a bargain because they anchor their perception of value to the
higher initial price.
The basic problem with the anchoring-and-adjustment heuristic is that the
adjustments are often insufficient in magnitude to offset the impact of the original
reference point.
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REPRESNTATIVE HEURISTIC
Example in real life:
1. I had went to the mall to buy a tshirt for my father. A man wearing an all black
outfit was standing next to the clothes so I approached him to ask about the
availability of different sizes, assuming that he is a salesperson. But he turned
out to be just another customer like me. I used a representative heuristic here,
because normally a salesperson is dressed in an all black outfit and I assumed
him to be one of them.
2. I invested in jio finance without checking its policies (saving cognitive effort). I
quickly invested in it because it is owned by Reliance and has been founded by
Mukesh Ambani. Since he has been running many successful endeavours, his
new endeavour is also bound to be successful. His success at reliance is
representative of his acumen and therefore investing in jio finance made sense.
AVAILABILITY HEURISTIC
Example in real life:
1. The number of heart attacks that are happening around has increased in the
past few years. Be it famous celebrities who we perceive to be the epitome of
health or neighbours or relatives, in the last few years the news of heart attacks
has increased. We also hear in the news and around us that young people are
getting heart attacks. I have formed an availability heuristic in my mind where
whenever I feel, or my friend feels pain in the right arm my mind right away
goes to heart attack. When my neighbour died, the first thing that came to my
mind was it must have been a heart attack.
2. A lot of speculation has been going on around about the side effects of covid
vaccine. Some say it has reduced immunity, while others say it has caused
hairfall, artery blockages etc. In the last year my immunity has also gone down,
so I immediately think that it is because of the vaccine due to the immediate
examples of others that come to my mind- availability heuristic.
ANCHORING AND ADJUSTMENT HEURISTIC
Example in real life:
1. Whenever I approach an auto, I go with a set price in mind (anchor) as a
reference point, then I try to negotiate as the driver quotes a higher price
stating that there is traffic today, the roads are blocked. So I adjust my initial
price (anchor) due to the situation at hand- high traffic.
2. Shopkeeper told me that the earrings were of 1800, and I bargained with him
and got it for 1000. I proudly told my friend that I had bargained successfully.
Later my friend told me she had seen the same earrings online for 500rs. But I
found the earlier bargain to be a great deal because of anchoring bias i.e. we
tend to use the information as a reference point or anchor and then adjust it to
draw conclusions.
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Conformity
Conformity is the tendency to change one's beliefs or behaviours to match the
behavior of others (Cialdini & Goldstein, 2004). It is a type of social influence in which
individuals change their attitudes or behavior to adhere to existing social norms.
Conformity is a trait that makes people change their behavior to fit social norms and
behave according to the wishes of others.( Crutchfield, 1955)Eg: Adhering to trending
fashion in teenagers is a common example of conformity.
Autokinetic-Effect Experiment:
Sherif (1935) conducted an experiment with the aim of demonstrating that people
conform to group norms when they are put in an ambiguous (i.e. unclear) situation.
Sherif used a lab experiment to study conformity. He used the autokinetic effect– this
is where a small spot of light (projected onto a screen) in a dark room will appear to
move, even though it is still (i.e. it is a visual illusion). It was discovered that when
participants were individually tested their estimates on how far the light moved varied
considerably (e.g. from 20cm to 80cm). The participants were then tested in groups of
three. Sherif manipulated the composition of the group by putting together two people
whose estimate of the light movement when alone was very similar, and one person
whose estimate was very different. Each person in the group had to say aloud how far
they thought the light had moved. Sherif found that over numerous estimates (trials)
of the movement of light, the group converged to a common estimate. The person
whose estimate of movement was greatly different from the other two in the group
conformed to the view of the other two. Sherif said that this showed that people would
always tend to conform. Rather than make individual judgments they tend to come to
a group agreement. Sherif had demonstrated that in an uncertain and ambiguous
situation people tend to conform to the norm established by a consistent peer. In
everyday life, a student who transfers to a new school midyear may adopt the norms
of dress and behaviour already established by other students in the class.
The Line Experiment in Asch:
Asch wondered if people conform if the stimulus situation were clear Asch reasoned
that when people face an unambiguous situation, they would trust their own
perceptions to give their independent judgment, even when every other member of a
group disagreed with them. Asch (1955) designed an experiment to test this
hypothesis. Five male college students were made to sit and judge the lengths of lines
on cards. They were shown a card containing only one line (the standard") and a
second card on which three lines of varying lengths had been drawn. Their task was to
choose the line on the second card that was most similar in length to the standard line
on the first card. One of the lines was exactly the same length as the standard,
whereas the other two were quite different from it. When the lines were shown, the
five participants answered aloud in the order in which they were seated. When all had
responded, the second set of lines was shown, responses were given, and the third set
of lines was presented. On the third trial, however, the first participant( who was a
confederate of Ache) looked carefully at the lines as before and then gave what was
obviously the wrong answer. The next- 3 participants gave the same wrong answer as
they were part of Ache’s team. Finally, the 5th participant also gave the same answer
as the other participants despite knowing that it was the wrong answer as the group
norm was stronger and different than his individual opinion.
