Heuristics In Social Cognition Research Paper

1. Judgments Under Suboptimal Conditions

Whereas traditional theories of human decision-making have focused on the normative aspects of valid judgments while neglecting the context in which they occur, the ‘heuristics’ approach has directed its attention to the psychological processes that enable individuals to make judgments and decisions under situational, motivational, and cognitive conditions that are less than optimal. Because decisions typically are made in a state of uncertainty, it has proven fruitful to identify the strategies that individuals actually use to arrive at solutions that do not represent the best possible outcome but simply meet specific criteria. The study of these simplifying rules of thumb, called ‘judgmental heuristics,’ has been spearheaded chiefly by Tversky and Kahneman (1974). Because the concept of heuristics is associated closely with these authors, the application of this term is often limited to the specific mechanisms they have identified. However, the underlying logic of heuristic processing also applies to other strategies that serve the same purpose, that of simplifying human judgments and making them feasible under suboptimal conditions.

Because generally it is not possible to identify the use of a heuristic procedure from the outcome of a judgment, researchers have had to create specific conditions under which heuristics lead to errors. As a result, heuristics have often been associated with the supposed irrationality of human reasoning (e.g., Nisbett and Ross 1980). However, just as visual illusions do not testify to the deficiency of human perception, the errors produced by judgmental heuristics are not proof of the inadequacy of human judgment in general; instead, they point to mechanisms that allow individuals to make acceptable decisions under natural constraints.

The discussion that follows will introduce the three most prominent heuristics.

2. The Availability Heuristic

In assessing the frequency or probability of an event (or the co-occurrence of several events), individuals often employ a strategy that is based on the ease with which bits of information can be retrieved or generated from memory. An employer wishing to gauge the rate of unemployment in their community may go to the trouble of obtaining the relevant information from official sources. But if they are not motivated or able to do that, they can try to think of unemployed friends or acquaintances. The more easily they are able to do so, the higher will be their estimate of the rate of unemployment. Tversky and Kahneman (1973) called this judgment strategy the ‘availability heuristic.’

Additional judgmental phenomena in the social domain are connected to the availability heuristic. One example is a risk whose assessment depends on the frequency with which a type of event occurs. Thus, riding a motor bicycle is risky to the extent that accidents occur frequently. However, the actual frequency of an event and the ease with which it comes to mind may be dissociated if certain events are more likely to be reported in the media. For example, Lichtenstein et al. (1978) found that causes of death frequently reported in the press were greatly overestimated in terms of their frequency. While heart disease causes 85 percent more deaths than accidents, only 20 percent of those surveyed thought that heart disease was the greater risk. The conspicuousness of events also influenced their availability. For example, in the study by Lichtenstein et al. (1978), the overestimated causes of death were especially dramatic and sensational (murder, flood, automobile accident), while the rather inconspicuous causes of death (heart disease, cancer, diabetes) were underestimated. Events that are known from personal experience are also more readily available (and therefore judged more likely to occur) than events that are only known through third parties (Greening et al. 1996).

It should be noted that ‘availability’ has two psychological components that usually are confounded: the content that comes to mind and the ease (or effort) experienced while retrieving the information from memory (Schwarz et al. 1991). Several studies from the domain of health psychology demonstrate the direct influence of experienced ease of retrieval on the assessment of risk. For example, Rothman and Schwarz (1998) found higher ratings of risk for contacting a heart disease when participants were asked to list three (easy to generate) instead of eight (difficult to generate) factors that increased their own risk.

Attitudinal judgments about everyday topics are also made on the basis of the availability heuristic under certain conditions. Wanke et al. (1996) reported more positive attitudes towards public transportation on the part of subjects if they had been asked previously to generate three instead of seven arguments in favor of public transportation. These experimental examples were constructed such that the retrieval of more information was associated with less experienced ease of recall. The results suggest that under suboptimal conditions, judgment is based on the experience of information retrieval and not on the content of what is retrieved.

Another example refers to the ease with which we are able to imagine a different course of events. Let us look at the following example of counterfactual thinking: ‘If I had gotten up five minutes earlier this morning I would not have missed the train, I would not have been late for the exam and would have been able to read the one additional problem I needed to pass the exam.’ What is crucial is that the ease with which an event can be undone mentally influences affective reactions to this event. While the person in this example would presumably feel a great deal of anger over being five minutes late, a person who overslept an hour instead of five minutes would be less angry. For a detailed account of recent findings on contrafactual thinking see Roese and Olson (1995).

Apart from these examples of judgments and affective reactions on the basis of the perceived ease of cognitive operations, the ‘availability principle’ in its general form, that is, the finding that increased accessibility of contents and cognitive structures influences judgments, has stimulated a host of research in social psychology. This pertains, for example, to work on the categorization of persons, causal attribution, the constancy of opinions after they have been discredited, or the testing of hypothesis.

3. The Representativeness Heuristic

The representativeness heuristic refers to people’s tendency to simplify categorical judgments by relying solely or excessively on similarity. For example, a person who wants to determine the profession of another person may use the target person’s similarity to the typical member of this profession. Consequently, a student might decide that a fellow student at the next table in a university cafeteria is a business administration major if they display the characteristics of a typical MBA student, such as reading the business section of the paper and talking about the stock exchange. Although this strategy has a logical basis, it tends to neglect other types of relevant information, such as base rates. For example, this university may have many more students of law than of business administration. Information about such a frequency distribution should affect the judgment in the same way as information about the target person. However, research by Tversky and Kahneman (1982) has demonstrated that such base rates largely are neglected even if the individuating information is not very diagnostic.

This neglect of base rates is strikingly similar to findings from attribution research. A number of studies discovered that when people identify the causes of an observed behavior, they attribute it to characteristics of the person and neglect situational influences. This response tendency implies that judges underestimate ‘consensus information’ (Kelley 1967) that reflects the power of situations. ‘Consensus information’ describes how other people behave under the same circumstances and serves as a basic determinant of causal attributions. Specifically, if everybody shows the same behavior in a given context there is little reason to attribute an action to the unique characteristics of the actor. The tendency to neglect such base-rate information in social judgments and to give it less weight than it should have under normative considerations can be understood as a manifestation of the representativeness heuristic because it consists of drawing inferences on the basis of similarity (‘a person who behaves aggressively is aggressive’) at the expense of base-rate information.

The relationship between this attributional bias and heuristic processing was demonstrated subsequently by varying the conduciveness of the judgmental situation (for a review, see Gilbert and Malone 1995). Researchers demonstrated that the neglect of situational influences depended on judges’ cognitive resources, such that this bias was more likely to occur when people were distracted.

The use of the representativeness heuristic may also result in violations of logical principles. In one study by Tversky and Kahneman (1983), judges had to assess the probability of the joint occurrence of two characteristics of a target (a liberated woman). One feature was highly representative (‘She is a feminist’) while the other was not (‘She is a bank teller’). In line with the representativeness heuristic, judges considered it less likely that the target person was a bank teller than that she was a feminist bank teller, which is, of course, logically impossible.

Other effects of the representativeness heuristic concern the misperception of chance and the neglect of sample size (Tversky and Kahneman 1974).

4. Anchoring And Adjustment

‘Anchoring and adjustment’ describes the phenomenon that judgments are assimilated toward a value that was initially considered. For example, a person who has to estimate the proportion of African nations in the UN may arrive at a higher percentage if they have been exposed previously to a high rather than a low standard of comparison. While such an influence would be hardly surprising if this ‘anchor’ is offered as a piece of information that is relevant to the judgment in question, Tversky and Kahneman (1974) were able to show that the resulting assimilation effect occurred even if relevance was ruled out by presenting the anchor as the outcome of a probabilistic process.

The psychological process that was suggested by Tversky and Kahneman (1974) for this phenomenon is an insufficient adjustment of the final judgment. Alternatively, Strack and Mussweiler (1997) have proposed a mechanism that is related to the availability heuristic, the so-called selective accessibility model. Here the anchoring effect involves two stages. In the first stage, judges engage in biased hypothesis testing when they consider the anchor as a possible value of the target. In this process, semantic information consistent with the anchor is activated. As a consequence of this selective activation, consistent information will be more accessible in a second stage when information for the final judgment will be retrieved. In this perspective, the anchoring effect is not the result of a numeric influence or a mere effect of insufficient adjustment but caused by a mechanism of semantic priming that has been demonstrated in many studies in social cognition (e.g., Higgins et al. 1977).

These supporting findings are not only important because they reflect the dynamics of many negotiation situations in which an initial offer greatly affects the final outcome but also because they are helpful in understanding the consequences of merely considering a possibility before forming a judgment. For example, it has been demonstrated that explaining a hypothetical event leads people to expect its actual occurrence (Ross et al. 1977). Similar outcomes were obtained for imagining a particular event (Carroll 1978). More dramatically, it was shown that merely thinking about an attitude object may lead a person to adopt more extreme attitudinal positions if he or she holds a schema about the object (e.g., Tesser et al. 1995). Perhaps the most relevant social domain is that of social comparisons. Here, work on the anchoring heuristic suggests a mechanism that explains why and under what conditions comparing ourselves to another person will make us appear similar to that person (Mussweiler and Strack 2000). The anchoring effect has also been invoked to explain the so-called hindsight bias (Fischhoff 1982).

5. Other Heuristics In Social Psychology

In the previous sections three basic judgmental strategies were introduced that were identified by Kahneman and Tversky as devices employed to form sufficiently accurate judgments under adverse conditions and with little cognitive effort, although under certain circumstances these strategies can lead to systematic distortions. The idea of heuristic information processing has been expanded subsequently to other heuristic cues, with lasting influence on theory formation in broad areas of social psychology.

A prominent example is the use of feelings as information. Specifically, it has been argued that under suboptimal circumstances, judges resort to their subjective experiences to generate a judgment on a different dimension. This has been demonstrated for both affective (e.g., Schwarz and Clore 1983) and nonaffective feelings, such as familiarity and mental effort (e.g., Strack and Neumann 2000). As discussed before, it has been shown that the availability heuristic operates through the use of the mental effort experienced by an individual engaged in a specific mental operation (Schwarz et al. 1991).

The idea of heuristics has become effective in a second line of research in social psychology. The study of persuasive communication, in particular, has profited from the distinction between heuristic and systematic processing (Chaiken 1987). In this domain, the reliance on peripheral cues (such as the expertise of the communicator or the length of the message) instead of on central features (i.e., the strength of the arguments) was shown to occur under suboptimal conditions. Similarly, it has been shown that the use of stereotypes obeyed the same regularities, such that people were more likely to use them when they were unwilling or unable to process individuating information (Bodenhausen and Lichtenstein 1987).

A final application and extension of the heuristics idea can be found in the domain of social influence. As Cialdini (1993) has argued, people’s proclivity to simplify their judgments can be exploited by agents of social influence. For example, an advertising agency may deliberately attempt to increase the ease with which certain information (presumably about their own product) may be brought to mind or try to associate positive feelings with the product. Cialdini has identified and described many more such strategies, which he called the most effective ‘weapons of influence.’

6. Conclusion And Future Directions

Over the years, the concept of heuristics has generated many insights into the cognitive dynamics of social behavior. At the same time, however, the idea of heuristic processing has gone far beyond the three mechanisms described by Kahneman and Tversky and it has been claimed that the use of heuristics may possess biologically adaptive value (Gigerenzer and Todd 1999). In a more general perspective, a universal psychological principle has emerged that sheds light on the flexibility of human information processing under divergent epistemic goals. However, the work of finding the laws of this flexibility and integrating it into psychological theorizing still needs to be done.

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