To put it simple, heuristic is a simple process which helps achieve sufficient, though imperfect, solutions to difficult answers. System 1 often takes this route when confronted with a difficult target question, if an easier heuristic one quickly comes to mind. Kahneman presented a table comparing the target and heuristic question (2011).
Target Question Heuristic Question
How much would you contribute to save an endangered species? How much emotion do I feel when I think of dying dolphins?
How happy are you with your …show more content…
Heuristics:
As discussed above, the essence of heuristics is indeed the system 1. After a long evolutionary history, in order to constantly adapt to new environments and survive, our system 1 has further evolved and become even better than that of animals. It has developed a new tool to save more mental energy, heuristic.
Heuristics exist as simple and efficient rules that people utilise in order to make judgements and decisions (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). These rules are often regarded as “rule of thumbs”, which means they are used very widely to simplify the situations based on the past experiences and information users have on hand to solve problems and make decisions. To put it simply, past experiences and information are constantly recorded throughout our lives, and afterwards sorted into rules or “task sets” so that system 1 can quickly use to deal with similar problems and …show more content…
Representative heuristics tend to ignore the percentage of a particular group in the population by only paying attention to the characteristics of the group. Therefore, when making judgement in these extreme cases (rare group or extremely popular group), people often underestimate/overestimate the probability (Bar-Hillel, 1980). For instance, it is an undeniable fact that former convicts do not receive the same treatment and judgement as other people. Imagine one walking into the interview room with fierce appearances, selection interviewers cannot help but suspect that is not a good person. In fact, not every former convict becomes a recidivist. However, that terrible image would cloud their judgments