Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart invites readers to embark on a new journey into a land of rationality that differs from the familiar territory of cognitive science and economics. Traditional views of rationality tend to see decision makers as possessing superhuman powers of reason, limitless knowledge, and all of eternity in which to ponder choices. To understand decisions in the real world, we need a different, more psychologically plausible notion of rationality, and this book provides it. It is (...) about fast and frugal heuristics--simple rules for making decisions when time is pressing and deep thought an unaffordable luxury. These heuristics can enable both living organisms and artificial systems to make smart choices, classifications, and predictions by employing bounded rationality. But when and how can such fast and frugal heuristics work? Can judgments based simply on one good reason be as accurate as those based on many reasons? Could less knowledge even lead to systematically better predictions than more knowledge? Simple Heuristics explores these questions, developing computational models of heuristics and testing them through experiments and analyses. It shows how fast and frugal heuristics can produce adaptive decisions in situations as varied as choosing a mate, dividing resources among offspring, predicting high school drop out rates, and playing the stock market. As an interdisciplinary work that is both useful and engaging, this book will appeal to a wide audience. It is ideal for researchers in cognitive psychology, evolutionary psychology, and cognitive science, as well as in economics and artificial intelligence. It will also inspire anyone interested in simply making good decisions. (shrink)

Despite the increasing recognition that heuristics may be involved in myriad scientific activities, much about how to use them prudently remains obscure. As typically defined, heuristics are efficient rules or procedures for converting complex problems into simpler ones. But this increased efficiency and problem-solving power comes at the cost of a systematic bias. As Wimsatt showed, biased modelling heuristics can conceal errors, leading to poor decisions or inaccurate models. This liability to produce errors presents a fundamental challenge (...) to the philosophical value of heuristic analyses. Heuristics may be powerful and efficient procedures, but their practical value for science and epistemology is significantly mitigated if we do not have a principled methodology for knowing how to use them wisely. In this essay, I extend Wimsatt’s analyses to argue that this challenge for a heuristic methodology can be met by appealing to second-order, or meta-, heuristics—that is, practical guidelines that prescribe the appropriate conditions for a first-order heuristic’s use. 1 Introduction2 Background3 Heuristics and Meta-heuristics4 A Hierarchical Model and Three Applications4.1 Decision making in emergency medicine4.2 Mathematical explanation in physics4.3 Resilience in ecological management5 Conclusion. (shrink)

An influential heuristic for thinking about climate adaptation asserts that “natural” adaptation strategies are the best ones. This heuristic has been roundly criticized but is difficult to dislodge in the absence of an alternative. We introduce a new heuristic that assesses adaptation strategies by looking at their maturity, power, and commitment. Maturity is the extent to which we understand an adaptation strategy’s effects. Power is the size of the effect an adaptation strategy will have. Commitment is the degree to which (...) an adaptation strategy is difficult to test or reverse. (shrink)

The functioning of a subject in a changing environment is most effective from the point of view of survival if the subject can form, maintain and use internal representations of the external world for decision-making. These representations are also called reflection in a broad sense. Using it, one can win in reflexive games since an internal representation of the enemy allows predicting their future moves. The goal is to assess the reflexive potential of heuristic model objects – artificial neural networks (...) – in the reflexive games “Even-Odd” (or “Matching pennies”) and “Rock-Paper-Scissors”. We used homogeneous fully connected neural networks of small sizes (from 8 to 45 neurons). Games were played between neural networks with different configurations and parameters (size, step size for modifying weight coefficients). A set of reflexivity criteria is presented, corresponding to different levels of consideration: neuronal, behavioral, formal. The transitivity of formal success in the game is shown. The most successful configurations, however, may not meet other criteria of reflexivity. We hypothesize that the best compliance with the criteria and, as a consequence, universal success in reflection tasks is achievable for heterogeneous configurations with a structure in which the formation of hierarchical systems of attractors is possible. (shrink)

The functioning of a subject in a changing environment is most effective from the point of view of survival if the subject can form, maintain and use internal representations of the external world for decision-making. These representations are also called reflection in a broad sense. Using it, one can win in reflexive games since an internal representation of the enemy allows predicting their future moves. The goal is to assess the reflexive potential of heuristic model objects – artificial neural networks (...) – in the reflexive games “Even-Odd” (or “Matching pennies”) and “Rock-Paper-Scissors”. We used homogeneous fully connected neural networks of small sizes (from 8 to 45 neurons). Games were played between neural networks with different configurations and parameters (size, step size for modifying weight coefficients). A set of reflexivity criteria is presented, corresponding to different levels of consideration: neuronal, behavioral, formal. The transitivity of formal success in the game is shown. The most successful configurations, however, may not meet other criteria of reflexivity. We hypothesize that the best compliance with the criteria and, as a consequence, universal success in reflection tasks is achievable for heterogeneous configurations with a structure in which the formation of hierarchical systems of attractors is possible. (shrink)

An influential suggestion about the relationship between Bayesianism and inference to the best explanation holds that IBE functions as a heuristic to approximate Bayesian reasoning. While this view promises to unify Bayesianism and IBE in a very attractive manner, important elements of the view have not yet been spelled out in detail. I present and argue for a heuristic conception of IBE on which IBE serves primarily to locate the most probable available explanatory hypothesis to serve as a working hypothesis (...) in an agent’s further investigations. Along the way, I criticize what I consider to be an overly ambitious conception of the heuristic role of IBE, according to which IBE serves as a guide to absolute probability values. My own conception, by contrast, requires only that IBE can function as a guide to the comparative probability values of available hypotheses. This is shown to be a much more realistic role for IBE given the nature and limitations of the explanatory considerations with which IBE operates. (shrink)

Prediction and control sufficient for reliable medical and other interventions are prominent aims of modeling in systems biology. The short-term attainment of these goals has played a strong role in projecting the importance and value of the field. In this paper I identify the standard models must meet to achieve these objectives as predictive robustness—predictive reliability over large domains. Drawing on the results of an ethnographic investigation and various studies in the systems biology literature, I explore four current obstacles to (...) achieving predictive robustness; data constraints, parameter uncertainty, collaborative constraints and system-scale requirements. I use a case study and the commentary of systems biologists themselves to show that current practices in the field, rather than pursuing these goals, frequently use models heuristically to investigate and build understanding of biological systems that do not meet standards of predictive robustness but are nonetheless effective uses of computation. A more heuristic conception of modeling allows us to interpret current practices as ways that manage these obstacles more effectively, particularly collaborative constraints, such that modelers can in the long-run at least work towards prediction and control. (shrink)

I conceptualise the role of dualities in quantum gravity, in terms of their functions for theory construction. I distinguish between two functions of duality in physical practice: namely, discovering and describing ‘equivalent physics’, versus suggesting ‘new physics’. I dub these the ‘theoretical’ versus the ‘heuristic’ functions of dualities. The distinction seems to have gone largely unnoticed in the philosophical literature: and it exists both for dualities, and for the more general relation of theoretical equivalence. The paper develops the heuristic function (...) of dualities: illustrating how they can be used, if one has any luck, to find and formulate new theories. I also point to the different physical commitments about the theories in question that underlie these two functions. I show how a recently developed schema for dualities articulates the differences between the two functions. (shrink)

This title invites readers to discover the simple heuristics that people use to navigate the complexities and surprises of environments populated with others.

The public must make assessments of a range of health-related issues. However, these assessments require scientific know-ledge which is often lacking or ineffectively utilized by the public. Lay people must use whatever cognitive resources are at their disposal to come to judgement on these issues. It will be contended that a group of arguments—so-called informal fallacies—are a valuable cognitive resource in this regard. These arguments serve as cognitive heuristics which facilitate reasoning when knowledge is limited or beyond the grasp (...) of reasoners. The results of an investigation into the use of these arguments by the public are reported. (shrink)

The philosophical conception of mechanistic explanation is grounded on a limited number of canonical examples. These examples provide an overly narrow view of contemporary scientific practice, because they do not reflect the extent to which the heuristic strategies and descriptive practices that contribute to mechanistic explanation have evolved beyond the well-known methods of decomposition, localization, and pictorial representation. Recent examples from evolutionary robotics and network approaches to biology and neuroscience demonstrate the increasingly important role played by computer simulations and mathematical (...) representations in the epistemic practices of mechanism discovery and mechanism description. These examples also indicate that the scope of mechanistic explanation must be re-examined: With new and increasingly powerful methods of discovery and description comes the possibility of describing mechanisms far more complex than traditionally assumed. (shrink)

Abstract.There is ample evidence that humans (and other primates) possess a knowledge instinct—a biologically driven impulse to make coherent sense of the world at the highest level possible. Yet behavioral decision‐making data suggest a contrary biological drive to minimize cognitive effort by solving problems using simplifying heuristics. Individuals differ, and the same person varies over time, in the strength of the knowledge instinct. Neuroimaging studies suggest which brain regions might mediate the balance between knowledge expansion and heuristic simplification. One (...) region implicated in primary emotional experience is more activated in individuals who use primitive heuristics, whereas two areas of the cortex are more activated in individuals with a strong knowledge drive: one region implicated in detecting risk or conflict and another implicated in generating creative ideas. Knowledge maximization and effort minimization are both evolutionary adaptations, and both are valuable in different contexts. Effort minimization helps us make minor and routine decisions efficiently, whereas knowledge maximization connects us to the beautiful, to the sublime, and to our highest aspirations. We relate the opposition between the knowledge instinct and heuristics to the biblical story of the fall, and argue that the causal scientific worldview is mathematically equivalent to teleological arguments from final causes. Elements of a scientific program are formulated to address unresolved issues. (shrink)

Surrogates’ decisions to withhold or withdraw life-sustaining treatments (LSTs) are pervasive. However, the factors influencing surrogates’ decisions to initiate LSTs are relatively unknown. We present evidence from two experiments indicating that some surrogates’ decisions about when to initiate LSTs can be predictably manipulated. Factors that influence surrogate decisions about LSTs include the patient’s cognitive state, the patient’s age, the percentage of doctors not recommending the initiation of LSTs, the percentage of patients in similar situations not wanting LSTs, and default treatment (...) settings. These results suggest that some people may use heuristics when making these important life-and-death decisions. These findings may have important moral implications for improving surrogate decisions about LSTs and reconsidering paternalism. (shrink)

In its focus on heuristics as opposed to hierarchically structured general principles, expert systems technology suggests a pedagogic strategy with affinities to the approaches of some of the creative philosophers of East and West, and a challenge to the reliance on presentation of general principles found in academic tradition. A tutoring approach to classroom presentation may be seen to relate to the point that non-trivial general principles cannot be verbally expressed without substantial loss of meaning.

This paper argues that emotions can play an epistemic role as justifiers of evaluative beliefs. It also presents the heuristics theory of emotion as an empirically informed explanation of how emotions can play such a role and why they in practice usefully complement non-affective evaluative judgments. As such, the heuristics theory represents a form of moderate rationalism: it acknowledges that emotions can be epistemically valuable, even privileged in some sense, but denies that they would be uniquely privileged. I (...) argue that judgments and emotional responses pick out different but correlated kinds of evaluative properties and therefore emotional responses and non-affective evaluative judgments play mutually complementary rather than mutually exclusive roles. It follows that emotional responses can be legitimately drawn upon to support evaluative beliefs, but they lack supreme epistemic authority. (shrink)

Is our case strong enough to go to trial? Will interest rates go up? Can I trust this person? Such questions - and the judgments required to answer them - are woven into the fabric of everyday experience. This book, first published in 2002, examines how people make such judgments. The study of human judgment was transformed in the 1970s, when Kahneman and Tversky introduced their 'heuristics and biases' approach and challenged the dominance of strictly rational models. Their work (...) highlighted the reflexive mental operations used to make complex problems manageable and illuminated how the same processes can lead to both accurate and dangerously flawed judgments. The heuristics and biases framework generated a torrent of influential research in psychology - research that reverberated widely and affected scholarship in economics, law, medicine, management, and political science. This book compiles the most influential research in the heuristics and biases tradition since the initial collection of 1982. (shrink)

In this paper, we explore the literature on cognitive heuristics and biases in light of virtue epistemology, specifically highlighting the two major positions—agent-reliabilism and agent-responsibilism —as they apply to dual systems theories of cognition and the role of motivation in biases. We investigate under which conditions heuristics and biases might be characterized as vicious and conclude that a certain kind of intellectual arrogance can be attributed to an inappropriate reliance on Type 1, or the improper function of Type (...) 2, cognitive processes. By the same token, the proper intervention of Type 2 processes results in the virtuous functioning of our cognitive systems. Moreover, the role of motivation in attenuating cognitive biases and the cultivation of certain epistemic habits points to the tenets of agent-responsibilism.. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that embodied cognition, like many other research traditions in cognitive science, offers mostly fallible research heuristics rather than grand principles true of all cognitive processing. To illustrate this claim, I discuss Aizawa’s rebuttal of embodied and enactive accounts of vision. While Aizawa’s argument is sound against a strong reading of the enactive account, it does not undermine the way embodied cognition proceeds, because the claim he attacks is one of fallible heuristics. These (...) class='Hi'>heuristics may be helpful in developing models of cognition in an interdisciplinary fashion. I briefly discuss the issue of whether this fallibility actually makes embodied cognition vulnerable to charges of being untestable or non-scientific. I also stress that the historical approach to this research tradition suggests that embodied cognition is not poised to become a grand unified theory of cognition. (shrink)

Heuristics can be regarded as justifying the actions and beliefs of problem-solving agents. I use an analysis of heuristics to argue that a symbiotic relationship exists between traditional epistemology and contemporary artificial intelligence. On one hand, the study of models of problem-solving agents usingquantitative heuristics, for example computer programs, can reveal insight into the understanding of human patterns of epistemic justification by evaluating these models'' performance against human problem-solving. On the other hand,qualitative heuristics embody the justifying (...) ability of defeasible rules, the understanding of which is provided by traditional epistemology. (shrink)

This paper considers the role of mathematics in the process of acquiring new knowledge in physics and astronomy. The defining of the notions of continuum and discreteness in mathematics and the natural sciences is examined. The basic forms of representing the heuristic function of mathematics at theoretical and empirical levels of knowledge are studied: deducing consequences from the axiomatic system of theory, the method of generating mathematical hypotheses, “pure” proofs for the existence of objects and processes, mathematical modelling, the formation (...) of mathematics on the basis of internal mathematical principles and the mathematical theory of experiment. (shrink)

Seventy-three children between 6 and 7 years of age were presented with a problem having ambiguous subgoal ordering. Performance in this task showed reliable fingerprints: a non-monotonic dependence of performance as a function of the distance between the beginning and the end-states of the problem, very high levels of performance when the first move was correct, and states in which accuracy of the first move was significantly below chance. These features are consistent with a non-Markov planning agent, with an inherently (...) inertial decision process, and that uses heuristics and partial problem knowledge to plan its actions. We applied a statistical framework to fit and test the quality of a proposed planning model. Our framework allows us to parse out independent contributions to problem-solving based on the construction of the value function and on general mechanisms of the search process in the tree of solutions. We show that the latter are correlated with children's performance on an independent measure of planning, while the former is highly domain specific. (shrink)

With respect to questions of fact, people use heuristics – mental short-cuts, or rules of thumb, that generally work well, but that also lead to systematic errors. People use moral heuristics too – moral short-cuts, or rules of thumb, that lead to mistaken and even absurd moral judgments. These judgments are highly relevant not only to morality, but to law and politics as well. Examples are given from a number of domains, including risk regulation, punishment, reproduction and sexuality, (...) and the act/omission distinction. In all of these contexts, rapid, intuitive judgments make a great deal of sense, but sometimes produce moral mistakes that are replicated in law and policy. One implication is that moral assessments ought not to be made by appealing to intuitions about exotic cases and problems; those intuitions are particularly unlikely to be reliable. Another implication is that some deeply held moral judgments are unsound if they are products of moral heuristics. The idea of error-prone heuristics is especially controversial in the moral domain, where agreement on the correct answer may be hard to elicit; but in many contexts, heuristics are at work and they do real damage. Moral framing effects, including those in the context of obligations to future generations, are also discussed. (shrink)

Stuart Rachels and Larry Temkin have offered a purported counter-example to the acyclicity of the relationship 'all things considered better than'. This example invokes our intuitive preferences over pairs of alternatives involving a single person's painful experiences of varying intensity and duration. These preferences, Rachels and Temkin claim, are confidently held, entirely reasonable, and cyclical. They conclude that we should drop acyclicity as a requirement of rationality. I argue that, together with the findings of recent research on the way people (...) evaluate episodes of pain, the use of a heuristic known as similarity-based decision-making explains why our intuitive preferences may violate acyclicity in this example. I argue that this explanation should lead us to regard these preferences with suspicion, because it indicates that they may be the result of one or more biases. I conclude that Rachels' and Temkin's example does not provide sufficient grounds for rejecting acyclicity. (shrink)

Recent work on inference to the best explanation has come to an impasse regarding the proper way to coordinate the theoretical virtues in explanatory inference with probabilistic confirmation theory, and in particular with aspects of Bayes's Theorem. I argue that the theoretical virtues are best conceived heuristically and that such a conception gives us the resources to explicate the virtues in terms of ceteris paribus theorems. Contrary to some Bayesians, this is not equivalent to identifying the virtues with likelihoods or (...) priors per se; the virtues may be more accessible epistemically than likelihoods or priors. I then prove a ceteris paribus theorem regarding theoretical consilience, use it to correct a recent application of Reichenbach's common cause principle, and apply it to a test case of scientific reasoning. Explanation and confirmation The heuristic conception of theoretical virtues Abduction and the accessibility of explanatory power Evidential and theoretical consilience A test case: gravitational lensing Conclusion Thus natural science appears completely to lose from sight the large and general questions; but all the more splendid is the success when, groping in the thicket of special questions, we suddenly find a small opening that allows a hitherto undreamt of outlook on the whole. (L. Boltzmann, Theoretical Physics and Philosophical Problems). (shrink)

Some theorists, ranging from W. James to contemporary psychologists, have argued that forgetting is the key to proper functioning of memory. The authors elaborate on the notion of beneficial forgetting by proposing that loss of information aids inference heuristics that exploit mnemonic information. To this end, the authors bring together 2 research programs that take an ecological approach to studying cognition. Specifically, they implement fast and frugal heuristics within the ACT-R cognitive architecture. Simulations of the recognition heuristic, which (...) relies on systematic failures of recognition to infer which of 2 objects scores higher on a criterion value, demonstrate that forgetting can boost accuracy by increasing the chances that only 1 object is recognized. Simulations of the fluency heuristic, which arrives at the same inference on the basis of the speed with which objects are recognized, indicate that forgetting aids the discrimination between the objects' recognition speeds. (shrink)

Philosophical analyses of scientific methodology have long understood intuition to be incompatible with a rule based reasoning that is often considered necessary for a rational scientific method. This paper seeks to challenge this contention by highlighting the indispensable role that intuition plays in the application of methodologies for scientific discovery. In particular, it seeks to outline a positive role for intuition and personal judgment in scientific discovery by exploring a comparison between the use of heuristic reasoning in scientific practice and (...) engineering design. While these discussions share many features, it will also be shown that the successful use of heuristics in engineering design is often considered to depend on a crucial factor that is markedly absent from accounts of the use of heuristics in scientific discovery; experienced judgment. In the final sections of this paper, I will compare attitudes to the role of computer analysis in scientific and engineering practices, with the aim of showing how the limitations of scientific discovery machines reveal the need for including intuition in philosophical accounts of heuristic reasoning in scientific discovery. (shrink)

Models in decision theory and game theory assume that preferences are determinate: for any pair of possible outcomes, a and b, an agent either prefers a to b, prefers b to a, or is indifferent as between a and b. Preferences are also assumed to be stable: provided the agent is fully informed, trivial situational influences will not shift the order of her preferences. Research by behavioral economists suggests, however, that economic and hedonic preferences are to some degree indeterminate and (...) unstable, which in turn suggests that other sorts of preferences may suffer the same problem. Even fully informed agents do not always determinately prefer a to b, prefer b to a, or feel indifferent as between a and b. Seemingly trivial situational influences rearrange the order of their preferences. One could respond that decision theory and game theory are not meant to describe actual behavior, and that they instead adumbrate an ideal of rationality from which human action diverges in various ways. When the divergences are small and systematic, they help us identify the heuristics that conspire to help people approximate rationality. One such heuristic, dubbed the Wilde heuristic, is explored. However, the divergences documented by behavioral economists threaten to be too large to handle through idealization. The Rum Tum Tugger Model, in which indifference is intransitive, is spelled out as one promising way for decision and game theory to retrench. Preferences may be locally unstable and indeterminate, but when the differences between options are sufficiently large, they approximate stability and determinacy. (shrink)

Mental arithmetic is characterised by a tendency to overestimate addition and to underestimate subtraction results: the operational momentum effect. Here, motivated by contentious explanations of this effect, we developed and tested an arithmetic heuristics and biases model that predicts reverse OM due to cognitive anchoring effects. Participants produced bi-directional lines with lengths corresponding to the results of arithmetic problems. In two experiments, we found regular OM with zero problems but reverse OM with non-zero problems. In a third experiment, we (...) tested the prediction of our model. Our results suggest the presence of at least three competing biases in mental arithmetic: a more-or-less heuristic, a sign-space association and an anchoring bias. We conclude that mental arithmetic exhibits shortcuts for decision-making similar to traditional domains of reasoning and problem-solving. (shrink)

Approaching science by considering the epistemological virtues which scientists see as constitutive of good science, and the way these virtues trade-off against one another, makes it possible to capture action that may be lost by approaches which focus on either the theoretical or institutional level. Following Wimsatt (1984) I use the notion of heuristics and biases to help explore a case study from the history of biology. Early in the 20th century, mutation theorists and natural historians fought over the (...) role that isolation plays in evolution. This debate was principally about whether replication was the central scientific virtue (and hence the ultimate goal of science to replace non-experimental evidence with experimental evidence) or whether consilience of inductions was the central virtue (and hence, as many kinds of evidence as possible should be pursued). (shrink)

Balancing the pros and cons of two options is undoubtedly a very appealing decision procedure, but one that has received scarce scientific attention so far, either formally or empirically. We describe a formal framework for pros and cons decisions, where the arguments under consideration can be of varying importance, but whose importance cannot be precisely quantified. We then define eight heuristics for balancing these pros and cons, and compare the predictions of these to the choices made by 62 human (...) participants on a selection of 33 situations. The Levelwise Tallying heuristic clearly emerges as a winner in this competition. Further refinements of this heuristic are considered in the discussion, as well as its relation to Take the Best and Cumulative Prospect Theory. (shrink)

. Heuristic is a central concept of Lakatos' philosophy both in his early works and in his later work, the methodology of scientific research programs. The term itself, however, went through significant change of meaning. In this paper I study this change and the ‘metaphysical’ commitments behind it. In order to do so, I turn to his mathematical heuristic elaborated in Proofs and Refutations. I aim to show the dialogical character of mathematical knowledge in his account, which can open a (...) door to hermeneutic studies of mathematical practice. (shrink)

I investigate the construction of the mathematical concept of quaternion from a methodological and heuristic viewpoint to examine what we can learn from it for the study of the advancement of mathematical knowledge. I will look, in particular, at the inferential microstructures that shape this construction, that is, the study of both the very first, ampliative inferential steps, and their tentative outcomes—i.e. small ‘structures’ such as provisional entities and relations. I discuss how this paradigmatic case study supports the recent approaches (...) to problem-solving and philosophy of mathematics, and how it suggests refinements of them. In more detail, I argue that the inferential micro-structures enable us to shed more light on the informal, heuristic side of mathematical practice, and its inferential and rational procedures. I show how they enable the generation of a problem, the construction of its conditions of solvability, the search for a hypothesis to solve it, and how these processes are representation-sensitive. On this base, I argue that: 1.the recent development of the philosophy of mathematics was right in moving from Lakatos’ initial investigation of the formal side of a mathematical proof to the investigation of the semi-formal, heuristic side of the mathematical practice as a way of understanding mathematical knowledge and its advancement. 2.The investigation of mathematical practice and discovery can be improved by a finer-grained study of the inferential micro-structures that are built during mathematical problem-solving. (shrink)

What is heuristic inquiry, anyway? -- Locating heuristic inquiry within contemporary qualitative research -- Philosophical and theoretical foundations of heuristic inquiry -- Heuristic processes and phases -- Heuristic research design -- Heuristic data collection, organization, and analysis -- Relationality, reflexivity, and meaning-making -- Evaluating the research: a collaborative process -- Writing a living manuscript: an embodied relational approach -- Ethics of heuristic research -- Universal applications of heuristic inquiry: bridging research and living experience -- An ending, beginning.

We propose that human reasoning relies on an inherence heuristic, an implicit cognitive process that leads people to explain observed patterns (e.g., girls wear pink) in terms of the inherent features of their constituents (e.g., pink is an inherently feminine color). We then demonstrate how this proposed heuristic can provide a unified account for a broad set of findings spanning areas of research that might at first appear unrelated (e.g., system justification, nominal realism, is–ought errors in moral reasoning). By revealing (...) the deep commonalities among the diverse phenomena that fall under its scope, our account is able to generate new insights into these phenomena, as well as new empirical predictions. A second main goal of this paper, aside from introducing the inherence heuristic, is to articulate the proposal that the heuristic serves as a foundation for the development of psychological essentialism. More specifically, we propose that essentialism—which is the common belief that natural and social categories are underlain by hidden, causally powerful “essences”—emerges over the first few years of life as an elaboration of the earlier, and more open-ended, intuitions supplied by the inherence heuristic. In the final part of the paper, we distinguish our proposal from competing accounts (e.g., Strevens' K-laws) and clarify the relationship between the inherence heuristic and related cognitive tendencies (e.g., the correspondence bias). In sum, this paper illuminates a basic cognitive process that emerges early in life and is likely to have profound effects on many aspects of human psychology. (shrink)

The program of research now known as the heuristics and biases approach began with a study of the statistical intuitions of experts, who were found to be excessively confident in the replicability of results from small samples. The persistence of such systematic errors in the intuitions of experts implied that their intuitive judgments may be governed by fundamentally different processes than the slower, more deliberate computations they had been trained to execute. The ancient idea that cognitive processes can be (...) partitioned into two main families--traditionally called intuition and reason--is now widely embraced under the general label of dual-process theories. Dual-process models come in many flavors, but all distinguish cognitive operations that are quick and associative from others that are slow and governed by rules. To represent intuitive and deliberate reasoning, we borrow the terms "system 1" and "system 2" from Stanovich and West. In the following section, we present an attribute-substitution model of heuristic judgment, which assumes that difficult questions are often answered by substituting an answer to an easier one. Following sections introduce a research design for studying attribute substitution, as well as discuss the controversy over the representativeness heuristic in the context of a dual-system view that we endorse. The final section situates representativeness within a broad family of prototype heuristics, in which properties of a prototypical exemplar dominate global judgments concerning an entire set. (shrink)

Even when they are defined with precision, one can often read and hear judgments about the vagueness of heuristics in debates about heuristic reasoning. This opinion is not just frequent but also quite reasonable. In fact, during the 1990s, there was a certain controversy concerning this topic that confronted two of the leading groups in the field of heuristic reasoning research, each of whom held very different perspectives. In the present text, we will focus on two of the papers (...) published in Psychological Review, wherein the arguments of each of these groups were presented:. (shrink)

Functionalists in philosophy of mind traditionally raise two major arguments against the type identity theory: (1) psychological states are _multiply realizable_ so that there are no one-to-one mappings of psychological states onto neural states and (2) the most that evidence could ever establish is the _correlation_ of psychological and neural states, not their identity. We defend a variant on the traditional type identity theory which we call _heuristic identity theory_ (HIT) against both of these objections. Drawing its inspiration from scientific (...) practice, heuristic identity theory construes identity claims as hypotheses that guide subsequent inquiry, not as conclusions of the research. (shrink)

The scope of a heuristic decision making rule is a product of its fit to the context, the extension to which a heuristic can be applied successfully. To achieve effective outcomes, decision makers may use a few heuristics with large scopes or many with narrow scopes. Through a directed review of the literature combined with ethnographic research, this paper contributes to the debate on the problem of scope in three types of heuristics, namely, multipliers, thresholds, and calends. The (...) scope of heuristic rules can be explored from different aspects, including the field in which a heuristic rule is applied and specific parameters that are used in a heuristic decision making process. The three types of heuristic rules we analyze were encountered in our ethnographic research, that was based on phenomenological interviews and observations. For these heuristics we discuss their scopes in through to the following organizing structures: the exploration of the adaptive tool-box, the role of ethnographic methodologies, and the categorization of heuristics. (shrink)

The thirty-five chapters in this book describe various judgmental heuristics and the biases they produce, not only in laboratory experiments but in important...

In the 1950s and 1960s, the search for the mechanism of oxidative phosphorylation by biochemists paralleled the description of mitochondrial form by George Palade and Fritiof Sjöstrand using electron microscopy. This paper explores the extent to which biochemists studying oxidative phosphorylation took mitochondrial form into account in the formulation of hypotheses, design of experiments, and interpretation of results. By examining experimental approaches employed by the biochemists studying oxidative phosphorylation, and their interactions with Palade, I suggest that use of mitochondrial form (...) as a guide to experimentation and interpretation varied considerably among investigators. Most notably, Peter Mitchell, whose chemiosmotic hypothesis was ultimately the basis of the correct mechanism of oxidative phosphorylation, incorporated crucial aspects of mitochondrial form into his model that others failed to recognize. I discuss these historical observations in terms of the background and training of the biochemists, as well as a proposed heuristic of form, whose use may increase the possibility that biologically meaningful molecular mechanisms will be discovered. (shrink)

This article described three heuristics that are employed in making judgements under uncertainty: representativeness, which is usually employed when people are asked to judge the probability that an object or event A belongs to class or process B; availability of instances or scenarios, which is often employed when people are asked to assess the frequency of a class or the plausibility of a particular development; and adjustment from an anchor, which is usually employed in numerical prediction when a relevant (...) value is available. These heuristics are highly economical and usually effective, but they lead to systematic and predictable errors. A better understanding of these heuristics and of the biases to which they lead could improve judgements and decisions in situations of uncertainty. (shrink)

We argue that the interaction of biased media coverage and widespread employment of the recognition heuristic can produce epistemic injustices. First, we explain the recognition heuristic as studied by Gerd Gigerenzer and colleagues, highlighting how some of its components are largely external to, and outside the control of, the cognitive agent. We then connect the recognition heuristic with recent work on the hypotheses of embedded, extended, and scaffolded cognition, arguing that the recognition heuristic is best understood as an instance of (...) scaffolded cognition. In section three, we consider the double-edged sword of cognitive scaffolding. On the one hand, scaffolds can reduce the internal processing demands on cognitive agents while increasing their access to information. On the other hand, the use of scaffolding leaves cognitive agents increasingly vulnerable to forming false beliefs or failing to form beliefs at all about particular topics. With respect to the recognition heuristic, agents rely on third parties (such as the media) to report not just what’s true but also what’s important or valuable. This makes cognitive agents relying on these third parties vulnerable to two erroneous influences: 1) because they don’t recognize something, it isn’t important or valuable, and 2) because they do recognize something, it is important or valuable. Call the latter the Kardashian Inference and the former the Darfur Inference. In section four, we use Fricker’s (2007) concept of epistemic injustice to characterize the nature and harm of these false inferences, with special emphasis on the Darfur Inference. In section five, we use data-mining and an empirical study to show how Gigerenzer’s population estimation task is liable to produce Darfur Inferences. We conclude with some speculative remarks on more important Darfur Inferences, and how to avoid them by scaffolding better. One primary way to accomplish this it to shift the burden of embodying the virtue of epistemic justice from the hearer or consumer of media to the media themselves. (shrink)

This article argues that heuristics play a key role in philosophy, in generating both our verdicts on proposed counterexamples to philosophical theories and philosophical paradoxes. Heuristics are efficient ways of answering questions, quick and easy to use, but imperfectly reliable. They have been studied by psychologists and cognitive scientists such as Gigerenzer and Kahneman, but their relevance to philosophical methodology has not been properly recognized. Several heuristics are discussed at length. The persistence heuristic can be summarized in (...) the slogan ‘Small changes don’t matter’. Without it, updating would present an intractable problem for both natural and artificial intelligence. But our reliance on the persistence heuristic also makes us vulnerable to paradoxes of vagueness. Disquotational heuristics of various kinds are considered. They play central roles in our ascriptions of truth, falsity, and belief, but they also generate semantic paradoxes such as the Liar and Frege puzzles about coreference. The use of an additive heuristic for combining reasons is also discussed. Our reliance on fallible heuristics in philosophy does not make philosophical knowledge impossible, just as our reliance on fallible heuristics in perception does not make perceptual knowledge impossible. Nevertheless, it should motivate us to take a more critical attitude to our data. By identifying and analyzing the heuristics on which we rely, we may be able to work out where they make us most vulnerable to error. (shrink)

I conceptualise the role of dualities in quantum gravity, in terms of their functions for theory construction. I distinguish between two functions of duality in physical practice: namely, discovering and describing ‘equivalent physics’, versus suggesting ‘new physics’. I dub these the ‘theoretical’ versus the ‘heuristic’ functions of dualities. The distinction seems to have gone largely unnoticed in the philosophical literature: and it exists both for dualities, and for the more general relation of theoretical equivalence. The paper develops the heuristic function (...) of dualities: illustrating how they can be used, if one has any luck, to find and formulate new theories. I also point to the different physical commitments about the theories in question that underlie these two functions. I show how a recently developed schema for dualities articulates the differences between the two functions. (shrink)

A general two-stage theory of human inference is proposed. A distinction is drawn between heuristic processes which select items of task information as ‘relevant’, and analytic processes which operate on the selected items to generate inferences or judgements. These two stages are illustrated in a selective review of work on both deductive and statistical reasoning. Factors identified as contributing to heuristic selection include perceptual salience, linguistic suppositions and semantic associations. Analytic processes are considered to be context dependent: people reason from (...) experience, not from inference rules. The paper includes discussion of the theory in comparison with other contemporary theories of human inference, and in relation to the current debate about human rationality. (shrink)