The Role of Heuristics in Social Cognition
What is social cognition?
Social cognition is how we interpret, analyse, remember and use information about the social world (Baron et al., 2009), making decisions every day and dealing with a great amount of information. The majority of decisions made are based on beliefs regarding the likelihood of uncertain events. Sometimes, beliefs concerning uncertainty are expressed in numerical form as odds or subjective probabilities. Therefore, the question of ‘how do people assess the probability of an uncertain event or the value of an uncertain quantity?’ arises (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). In addition, people must operate within the constraints imposed by both their cognitive resources and the task environment; this is known as bounded reality (Simon, 1990). As a result, any additional input beyond their bounded reality leads to information overload (Baron et al., 2009) which can be dangerous. To assess probabilities and prevent a state of information overload, individuals use heuristics.
What are heuristics?
Heuristics are strategies which reduce the complex tasks of assessing probabilities and predicting values to simpler judgmental operations (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). It is also a technique to arrive at satisfactory solutions with the modest amount of processing, implying that people seek to reduce the effort associated with decision processes (Simon, 1990). Therefore, heuristics use principles of effort-reduction and simplification. Shah & Oppenheimer (2008) proposed that individuals use these effort-reduction principles, even if they are not consciously aware of having adopted them and that heuristics rely on one or more of the following:
• Examining fewer cues
• Reducing the difficulty associated with retrieving and storing cue values
• Simplifying the weighting principles for cues
• Integrating less information
• Examining fewer alternatives
There are many types of heuristics; however, here the effort-reduction principles which decrease the
Social cognition is how we interpret, analyse, remember and use information about the social world (Baron et al., 2009), making decisions every day and dealing with a great amount of information. The majority of decisions made are based on beliefs regarding the likelihood of uncertain events. Sometimes, beliefs concerning uncertainty are expressed in numerical form as odds or subjective probabilities. Therefore, the question of ‘how do people assess the probability of an uncertain event or the value of an uncertain quantity?’ arises (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). In addition, people must operate within the constraints imposed by both their cognitive resources and the task environment; this is known as bounded reality (Simon, 1990). As a result, any additional input beyond their bounded reality leads to information overload (Baron et al., 2009) which can be dangerous. To assess probabilities and prevent a state of information overload, individuals use heuristics.
What are heuristics?
Heuristics are strategies which reduce the complex tasks of assessing probabilities and predicting values to simpler judgmental operations (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). It is also a technique to arrive at satisfactory solutions with the modest amount of processing, implying that people seek to reduce the effort associated with decision processes (Simon, 1990). Therefore, heuristics use principles of effort-reduction and simplification. Shah & Oppenheimer (2008) proposed that individuals use these effort-reduction principles, even if they are not consciously aware of having adopted them and that heuristics rely on one or more of the following:
• Examining fewer cues
• Reducing the difficulty associated with retrieving and storing cue values
• Simplifying the weighting principles for cues
• Integrating less information
• Examining fewer alternatives
There are many types of heuristics; however, here the effort-reduction principles which decrease the
References: Baron, A. R., Branscombe, R. N., & Byrne, D. (2009). Social Psychology (12th ed.) USA: Pearson Education Inc., pp. 43–48. Epley, N., & Gilovich, T. (2006). The anchoring and adjustment heuristic: why the adjustments are insufficient. Psychological Science, 17 (4), pp.311–318. Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A Kunda , Z. (1999). Social cognition: Making sense of people. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Newell, A., & Simon, H. A. (1972). Human problem solving. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Rothman, A. J., & Hardin, C. D. (1997). Differential use of the availability heuristic in social judgment. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 23 (2), pp. 123–138. DOI: 10.1177/0146167297232002 Ruder, M., & Bless, H Schwarz, N., Bless, H., Strack, F., Klumpp, G., Rittenauer-Schatka, G., & Simons, A. (1991). Ease of retrieval as information: Another look at the availability heuristic. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61 (2), pp. 195–202. Shah, K. A., & Oppenheimer, M. D. (2008). Heuristics Made Easy: An Effort-Reduction Framework. Psychological Bulletin, 134 (2), pp. 207–222. DOI: 10.1037/0033-2909.134.2.207 Simon, H Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974, September 27). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science, 185 (4157), pp. 1124–1131.