The Characteristics Of Heuristics: Approach To Problem Solving

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HEURISTICS:
A heuristic technique is any approach to problem solving that employs a practical method sufficient for the immediate goals. Heuristics are strategies derived from experience with similar problems that uses readily accessible information to control problem solving in human beings, machines, and abstract issues. In psychology, heuristics are simple, efficient rules, that have been made to explain how people make decisions, and solve problems typically when facing complex problems or incomplete information. Researchers test if people use those rules with various methods. These rules work well under most circumstances, but in certain cases lead to systematic errors. Examples of this method include using a rule of thumb, an educated …show more content…

In other words we often rely on how easy it is to think of examples when making a decision or judgement.When you try to make a decision, a number of related events or situations might immediately pop up in your mind. As a result, you might judge that those events are more frequent and than others. When you are trying to make a decision, you might remember a number of relevant instances. Since these are more readily available in the memory, you will likely judge these outcomes as being more common or frequently occurring. For example, if you are thinking of flying and suddenly think of a number of recent airline accidents, you might feel like air travel is too dangerous and decide to travel by car instead of going by air. Because those examples of air disasters come to your mind so easily, the availability heuristic leads you to think that plane crashes are more common than they really are. You give greater credence to this information and tend to overestimate the probability and likelihood of similar things happening in the …show more content…

It is also important that those features be salient. For example, people have long believed that ulcers were caused by stress, due to the representativeness heuristic, when in fact bacteria cause ulcers. In a similar line of thinking, in some alternative medicine beliefs patients have been encouraged to eat organ meat that corresponds to their medical disorder. Use of the representativeness heuristic can be seen in even simpler beliefs, such as the belief that eating fatty foods makes one fat. Even physicians may be swayed by the representativeness heuristic when judging similarity, in diagnoses, for example:The researcher found that clinicians use the representativeness heuristic in making diagnoses by judging how similar patients are to the stereotypical or prototypical patient with that

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