Heuristics are strategies that ignore information in order to make faster decisions. Traditional theories of decision-making (including the highly influential “heuristics-and-biases framework”; Tversky and Kahneman 1974) suggest that heuristics are suboptimal shortcuts that lead to systematic errors, trading accuracy for speed. These frameworks imply that heuristics are irrational and that decision-makers would be better off if they could avoid heuristics altogether.
In reality, heuristics are extremely sensible, having proven to be reliable tools for successfully navigating diverse situations of uncertainty (Gigerenzer et al. 1999, 2011; Gigerenzer and Gaissmaier 2011). For example, Ortmann et al. (2008) observed that, on average, stock portfolios created using the recognition heuristic(i.e., if one option is recognized and the other is not, choose the recognized option) outperformed unplanned portfolios, the market, managed funds, and stock experts. Heuristics are not only useful...
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Gonzales, J., Mishra, S. (2018). Heuristics. In: Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_626-1
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