3. What is heuristic reasoning? What are the pros and cons of heuristic reasoning?

Key Points:

• Thinking, understanding and decision-making take place in the real world, where there are usually considerable time pressures, and there is rarely a full range of information available to support a complete appraisal of the problem at hand.
• Kahneman, Slovic and Tversky (1982) popularized the term ‘heuristic reasoning’ for thinking and decision-making that involves short cuts.
• Perhaps the simplest kind of heuristic reasoning is availability.
• Mechanisms that come under the availability rubric.
• Bias through the use of the availability heuristic.
• The representativeness heuristic is based on the principle that we can estimate the likelihood of something by seeing how well it fits a prototype of which it may be an exemplar.
• Like availability, representativeness is a double-edged weapon – it can lead to fallacious reasoning, e.g. the ‘fallacy of ignoring base-rate’.