Decision Making and Heuristics

Decision Making and Heuristics

Kaplan University

PS200 – Unit 8 Assignment

Decision making is something that we all do on an everyday basis throughout our lives, so much that we don’t even realize how much we actually do. There are three different types of heuristics that we use to influence us in our decision-making process: representativeness, availability, and anchoring, as well as adjustment heuristics. Heuristics are shortcuts that people utilize to develop judgments and make decisions. “A mental shortcut that allows people to work out problems, and make judgments quickly and proficiently.” (Cherry, 2015). Heuristics helps us to be more time sufficient, so that we are able to carry on with the next thing that comes about as the day goes on. These mental shortcuts tend to emphasis on one characteristic of a problem while disregarding other features. They can result in both good rational decisions, and inappropriate unreasoned decisions. Heuristics are normally helpful, and they are also necessary when getting through the day making our decisions and choices. Representativeness is the first of the heuristics that influences our decision making.

The representativeness heuristic is used when making judgments about the probability of an event under uncertainty. However, judgments by representativeness only look at the resemblance between the hypothesis and the data, thus inverse probabilities are equated. When making decisions, we tend to overlook quite a few aspects of important statistical nature due to representativeness being so persuasive and compelling. (Matlin, 2013, p.422). These issues can deceive the accurateness and process of the decision making and cause a mistake. Many of these misconceptions of the representative subjects comprise size, frequency, and probability which cause us to make bad decisions.

An example of where we use the representativeness heuristic to decide would be when we are with a big group of people at the park with friends, but we are not the only group. We all know how many children there are when we get there so before we leave we count heads of all of them once more before we go. We had counted the correct number of children, but when all of us are back on the bus we notice that one of the children are not one of ours. We thought we had them all due to the correct number, but because we didn’t exactly look at them all and just counted we ended up with one of the children being the wrong child. Because we had the wrong number one of our kids were left behind, and we had a child that didn’t belong. By not checking to see them all lined up side by side to make sure they were the right kids, we made a bad decision.

Next, is known as the availability heuristic. The availability heuristic is availability heuristic is a mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to a given person’s mind when evaluating a specific topic, concept, method or decision. The availability heuristic operates on the notion that if something can be recalled, it must be important, or at least more important than alternative solutions which are not as readily recalled. The availability heuristic is basically a general, helpful, and doubtless precise strategy if the accessibility is true and unbiased, which in most cases, it is.

Recency is relevant to the amount of time since we last saw an item. The more current it has been seen the more obtainable they are in our memory, the longer amount of time it has been since we have seen this item the less likely we will recall it in relation to availability. For example if I was to see a picture of a cat , but there after seen 25 different things, remember if I had seen the cat the first time I looked ore the secong would be harder remember. If all I seen was cats then a few in between it would have been easier.

References: http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/_/cite.aspx?url=http%3A%2F%2Fencyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com%2FRepresentativeness%2Bheuristic&word=Representativeness%20heuristic&sources=wiki

Websites:

Representativeness heuristic. (n.d.) Wikipedia.org. (2014). Retrieved March 16 2017 from http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Representativeness+heuristic

Matlin, M. (2013). Cognition (8th edition). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley

recency. (n.d.) American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. (2011). Retrieved March 15 2017 from http://www.thefreedictionary.com/recency