"Heuristics": The Mental Shortcuts of Human Thought

Vertebrate animals are characterized by face dozens of crucial decisions in our day to day. When to rest, with whom to relate, when to flee and when not to, what is the meaning of a visual stimulus... All of this falls within the repertoire of small daily dilemmas whose resolution is an inevitable consequence of living in complex environments.

Furthermore, when the vertebrate animal in question is the Homo sapiens of modern societies, these decisions multiply to transform into massive waves of issues that require our attention: who to vote for, where to look for work, to which managers to delegate homework, etc. There are many questions and not all of them are easy to answer and, however, with some exceptions, we solve them with astonishing ease and without the need to go into a nervous breakdown. How do you explain this? The answer is that, in part, we do not solve these questions as they present themselves, but we take mental shortcuts called heuristics.

What is a heuristic?

In psychology, a heuristic is a rule that is followed in a

unconscious to reformulate a problem and transform it into a simpler one that can be solved easily and almost automatic. In short, it is a kind of mental trick to guide decision-making along easier paths of thought. Consider, for example, the following dilemma, which we will call the "original problem":

• Who should I vote for in the next general election?

For anyone who believes in representative democracy, this is a relatively important decision, requiring deep reflection on various issues (environmental management, political gender, proposals against corruption, etc.) and to which there is a very limited range of possible responses (abstention, blank vote, invalid vote or valid vote for one of the candidacies). Obviously, reaching the decision of who to vote for according to the different criteria and parameters that appear in the electoral programs is a difficult task. So hard that no one does it. Rather than answering the initial question, a particularly seductive heuristic may loom in the minds of some voters:

• Which party is made up of the largest number of politicians that I do not dislike?

This is a very different problem from the first. So different, in fact, that it deserves a different name: for example, "simplified problem." This is where heuristic thinking plays a role. Thesimplified problem only includes one dimension That must be considered, a rating scale that can be expressed from 0 (I like them all very badly) to 10 (this game is not bad) and whose answer will be based only on subjective impressions. However, this second question keeps a equivalence relation with the previous one: we give you an answer to use to answer the first one.

In this case, the winning option resulting from the heuristic process, which in this case is the name of a political party, will be transported back to the world of thoughtful reflections and will take a seat at the end of the original question as if nothing had past.

The easy decision is the automatic decision

All of the above occurs without the voter we use for this example noticing what has happened. While this psychological process is guided by the logic of involuntary heuristics, the voter does not even have to set out to transform the original problem into a simplified problem: this will happen automatically, because deciding whether or not to follow this strategy is itself an added setback with which the busy conscious mind cannot wants to deal.

The existence of this heuristic will make it possible a quick and convenient answer to a complex question and, therefore, you will renounce the pretense of dedicating time and resources to search for the most exact answer. These mental shortcuts are a kind of lesser evil that is used in the face of the impossibility of attending to everyone and each of the problems that must be tackled, theoretically, by an awakened thinking style and rational. Therefore, the consequences of being guided by them are not always positive.

An example of heuristic thinking

At the end of the eighties, one of the experiments that best exemplified a case of thought guided by a heuristic was carried out. A team of psychologists asked a series of young Germans two very specific questions:

• Are you happy these days?

• How many dates did you have in the past month?

The interest of this experiment was in studying the possible existence of correlation between the answers to these two questions, that is, if there was any relationship between the answer given to one of the questions and the answer given to the other. The results were negative. Both seemed to deliver results regardless of what was answered to the other. However, by reversing the order of the questions and raise them like this to another group of young people, yeah a correlation appeared very significant. People who answered that they had had a number of appointments close to 0 were also more pessimistic when assessing their level of happiness. What had happened?

By the rules of the heuristic, the most likely explanation is that the people in the second group had extended the The answer to the first question, the easiest to answer, to the second, the resolution of which would imply reflecting during a little while. Thus, while the young people of the first group had had no choice but to seek an answer to the question "do you feel happy? these days? ", those of the second group unconsciously substituted this question for the one they had answered seconds before, that of the quotes. Thus, for them the happiness they were asking about in the experiment had become a very specific type of happiness, easier to value. That of happiness related to love life.

The case of the young Germans is not an isolated case. The question about happiness is also substituted when it is preceded by a question related to the economic situation or family relationships of the experimental subject. In all these cases, the question that is posed in the first place facilitates the follow-up of the heuristic when answering the second one thanks to an effect of priming.

Is the use of heuristics common?

Everything seems to indicate that yes, it is very common. The fact that the heuristic responds to pragmatic criteria suggests that, where there is decision-making to which we do not dedicate the effort it deserves, there is a trace of heuristics. This basically means that a very large part of our mental processes are discreetly guided by this logic. Prejudices, for example, are one of the forms that mental shortcuts can take when dealing with a reality about which we lack data (How is this Japanese in particular?).

Now, we should also ask ourselves if the use of the heuristic resource is desirable. On this issue there are opposing positions even among experts. One of the great specialists in decision-making, the psychologist Daniel kahneman, believes that the use of these cognitive shortcuts is worth reducing as soon as possible, as they lead to biased conclusions. Gerd gigerenzerHowever, he embodies a somewhat more moderate stance, and argues that heuristics can be a useful and relatively effective way of solving problems that we would otherwise be left with stuck.

Of course, there are reasons to be cautious. From a rational perspective, it cannot be justified that our attitudes towards certain people and political options are conditioned by prejudices and light ways of thinking. In addition, it is worrying to think what can happen if the minds behind large projects and business movements obey the power of the heuristic. It is credible, considering that it has been seen how the prices of Wall Street shares can be influenced by the presence or not of clouds that block the sun.

In any case, it is clear that the empire of the heuristic is vast and is yet to be explored. The diversity of situations in which a mental shortcut can be applied is practically infinite, and the consequences of following a heuristic or not also seem to be important. What is certain is that, even though our brain is designed like a maze in which our conscious mind is used to getting lost in a thousand minute operations, our unconscious has learned to discover and travel many of the secret passages that remain a mystery to us.

Bibliographic references:

• Kahneman, D. (2011). Think fast, think slow. Barcelona: Random House Mondadori.
• Saunders, E. M. Jr. (1993). Stock Prices and Wall Street Weather. American Economic Review, 83, pp. 1337 - 1345.
• Strack, F., Martin, L. L. Schwarz, N. (1988). Priming and Communication: Social Determinants of Information Use in Judgments of Life Satisfacion. European Journal of Social Psychology, 18 (5), pp. 429 - 442.