Heuristics 1 1 1 1

Marcela Levayova
Social Psychology
February 09, 2015

Heuristics
In a video called Attitudes and Attitude Change, professor Mahzarin Banaji talks about implicit attitudes and how it is an unconscious decision maker that works for us when we make decisions. Implicit attitudes rest in our minds, they are our likes and preferences just like any other attitude. It is not conscious and we might not be aware of it therefore it can’t be controlled either. Heuristics are believed to be also unconsciously and automatically applied much like implicit thoughts, and both of these cognitive processes are conscious and unconscious.
We make decisions and judgments every day, if we can trust someone, if we should do something, which route to take, how to respond to someone who's upset, and the list goes on. If we carefully considered and analyzed every possible outcome of these decisions and judgments, we would never do anything else.
Thankfully, our mind makes things easier for us by using efficient thinking strategies known as heuristics. A heuristic is a mental shortcut that helps us make decisions and judgments quickly without having to spend a lot of time researching and analyzing information.
Most of the time, heuristics are extremely helpful, but they can lead to errors in judgment. There are several different categories or types of heuristics.
In a peer reviewed journal by Allen Lind called Social conflict and the fairness in social psychology, Lind demonstrates how conflicts arise and how they escalate. The author discusses how people manage to avoid conflict in the many social situations in which it might arise but does not. The answer lies in the psychology of social justice. Specifically, research on the psychology of justice suggests that people use their perception of fair or unfair treatment as a heuristic to guide behavior across a wide variety of social situations. People will cooperate, even against their own immediate interests, when they believe that others are treating them fairly, and they will compete when they believe that others are treating them unfairly. Understanding the psychology of the fairness judgments that sustain this heuristic leads to better understanding of when conflict will or will not occur and how it might be avoided.
A news story by Swan describes a machine which is learning heuristic to identify biologically relevant omics data that investigates different learning methods. The results have shown the machine features a reduction method that is suitable for analyzing both proteomic and transcript omics data. Methods that generate large comics' datasets are increasingly being used in the area of rheumatology.
Conclusion is the feature reduction methods show an advantage for the analysis of omics data in the field of rheumatology, and the applications of such techniques are likely to result in improvements in diagnosis, treatment, and drug discovery. To be able to teach a machine to think in ways that creates shortcuts in its processes is an astonishing improvement in technology.
Heuristics is the process of gaining knowledge or some desired result by intelligent guesswork rather than by following some pre-established formula. The term seems to have two usages. Describing an approach to learning by trying without necessarily having an organized hypothesis. That is the "trial-by-error" learning.
The second is pertaining to the use of the general knowledge gained by experience, sometimes expressed as "using a rule-of-thumb."

Resources

Banaji, M. (2012). Social Psychology, 13th Ed. Video Attitudes and Attitude Change.

Lind, E. Allan. Representative Research in Social Psychology. Vol.21 1997, pp. 6-22. Journal; Peer Reviewed Journal.

Swan, L. Bacardit Credits/Source: BMC Genomics 2015, 16:S2 http://7thspace.com/headlines/502541/a_machine_learning_heuristic_to_identify_biologically_relevant_and_minimal_biomarker_panels_from_omics_data.html.