Vertebrate animals are characterized by facing dozens of crucial decisions in our daily life. When to rest, who to relate to, when to run away from and when not, what meaning a visual stimulus has… all of this falls within the repertoire of small daily dilemmas whose resolution is an inevitable consequence of living in complex environments.

Moreover, when the vertebrate animal in question is the Homo sapiens of modern societies, these decisions multiply to become massive waves of questions that require our attention: who to vote for, where to look for work, to which managers to delegate tasks, etc. There are many questions and not all of them are easy to answer, and yet, with a few exceptions, we resolve them with astonishing ease and without the need to enter into a nervous breakdown. How can this be explained? The answer is that, partly, we do not solve these questions as they are presented to us, but we take some mental shortcuts called heuristics .

What is a heuristic?

In psychology, a heuristic is a rule that is followed in an unconscious way to reformulate a problem posed and transform it into a simpler one that can be solved easily and in an almost automatic way . In short, it is a kind of mental trick to guide decision making along easier paths of thought. Let us think, for example, of the following dilemma, which we will call “original problem”:

Who should I vote for at the next general election?

For anyone who believes in representative democracy, this is a relatively important decision, which requires deep reflection on several issues (environmental management, gender policy, anti-corruption proposals, etc.) and to which there is a very limited range of possible responses (abstention, blank vote, void vote or valid vote for one of the candidates). Clearly, deciding who to vote for according to the different criteria and parameters contained in the electoral programmes is a difficult task. So difficult that nobody does it . Instead of answering the initial question, a particularly seductive heuristic may be outlined 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 one. So different, in fact, that it deserves a different name: for example, “simplified problem”. This is where heuristic thinking comes in. The simplified problem only includes one dimension that must be considered, a value scale that can be expressed from 0 (I like them all very much) to 10 (this party is not bad) and whose answer will be based only on subjective impressions. However, this second question keeps an 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 biased reflections and will take a seat at the end of the original question as if nothing had happened.

The easy decision is the automatic decision

All this happens without the voter we are using for this example noticing what has happened. While this psychological process is guided by the logic of involuntary heuristics , the voter does not even need 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 in itself an added setback that the busy conscious mind does not want to deal with.

The existence of this heuristic will make possible a quick and comfortable answer to a complex question and, therefore, it will give up the pretension of spending time and resources searching 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 each and every problem that must be faced, theoretically, by a style of awake and rational thinking. For this reason, the consequences of allowing ourselves to be guided by them are not always positive.

An example of heuristic thinking

At the end of the 1980s, one of the experiments that best exemplifies a case of heuristic thinking was conducted. A team of psychologists asked a number of young Germans two very specific questions:

Are you feeling happy these days?

How many dates did you have last month?

The interest of this experiment was to study the possible existence of a 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 one given to the other. The results were negative. Both seemed to give results regardless of what was answered to the other. However, by reversing the order of the questions and asking them in this way to another group of young people, a very significant correlation did appear. The people who answered that they had had a number of dates close to 0 were also more pessimistic when it came to assessing their level of happiness. What had happened?

According to the rules of the heuristic, the most likely explanation is that the people in the second group had extended the answer of the first question, the easiest to answer, to the second one, the resolution of which would imply reflecting for a while. Thus, while the young people in the first group had had no choice but to look for an answer to the question “are you happy these days”, those in the second group unconsciously substituted this question for the one they had answered seconds before, the one about quotes. Thus, for them, the happiness asked in the experiment had become a very concrete type of happiness, easier to value . That of happiness related to the love life.

The case of the young Germans is not an isolated one. The question of happiness is also substituted when it is preceded by a question concerning the economic situation or family relations of the experimental subject. In all these cases, the question that is asked first 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’s very common. The fact that heuristics respond to pragmatic criteria makes us think that, where there is a decision-making process to which we do not dedicate the effort it deserves , there is a trail 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 particular Japanese one? ).

However, we should also ask ourselves whether 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, psychologist Daniel Kahneman, believes that it is worth reducing the use of these cognitive shortcuts as soon as we can, as they lead to biased conclusions.Gerd Gigerenzer, however, embodies a somewhat more moderate position, and argues that heuristics can be a useful and relatively effective way of solving problems where we would otherwise get 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 . Furthermore, it is worrying to think about what can happen if the minds behind great business projects and movements obey the power of the heuristic. This is credible, considering that it has been seen how Wall Street stock prices can be influenced by the presence or absence of clouds covering the sun.

In any case, it is clear that the heuristic empire is vast and has 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, although our brain is designed as a labyrinth in which our conscious mind is used to getting lost in a thousand minute operations, our unconscious has learned to discover and travel through many of the secret passages that remain a mystery to us.

If you are interested in knowing more about the concept of heuristics, here is a video in which Gigerenzer talks about this topic:

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 Satisfaction. European Journal of Social Psychology , 18(5), pp. 429 – 442.