Asked by Ricky Menchaca on Jun 16, 2024

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Often the issues that you have to resolve quickly on a daily basis are complicated and you don't have time to go through every possible solution. You want a "good enough" answer or one that works most of the time. Define the concept of heuristics. In addition, define availability heuristic and representative heuristic and give an example of each type of heuristic.

Heuristics

Cognitive shortcuts or rules of thumb that simplify decision making by enabling quicker judgments with less effort but potentially at the expense of accuracy.

Availability Heuristic

A mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to a person’s mind when evaluating a specific topic, concept, method, or decision.

Representative Heuristic

A cognitive bias in which an individual categorizes a situation based on how similar it is to their prototype of a particular event or behavior, often leading to errors in decision making or judgment.

  • Recognize mental shortcuts and their impact on judgment and decision-making processes.
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Little LachyJun 19, 2024
Final Answer :
Heuristics are strategies for simplifying a problem and generating a satisfactory guess.
The availability heuristic is the strategy of assuming that how easily one can remember examples of some kind of item indicates how common the item itself is. An example is believing that more individuals die in plane accidents than motor vehicle accidents due to the increased media coverage associated with plane accidents.
The representative heuristic is the assumption that an item that resembles members of some category is probably another member of that category. An example is: an individual is given the description of a person who is an American civil liberties attorney who supports Planned Parenthood. They are then asked whether it is more likely that the person described is a woman or a feminist woman. If the individual selects a feminist woman rather than a woman, they are not considering base rates and are basing their decision on their prototype of a feminist woman.