The Meaning Of Heuristics And Connection To Stereotyping

Heuristic reasoning is the tendency, or, in other words very helpful, of depending on highly effective and for the most part solid psychological shortcuts when wanting to make a choice. These psychological shortcuts are known as cognitive heuristics. These cognitive maneuvers are as much a piece of the thinking process as argument making. cognitive heuristics regularly empower us to settle on judgments and choices all the more quickly and effectively. Their persuasions, ‛while frequently positive, can bring blunders and predispositions into human decision making. It was introduced first by Tversky and Kahneman (1974) where they coined the term cognitive shortcuts as heuristics. They claimed that people break down complex problem solving to what is simpler in terms of when they need to judge and make a decision.

There are three classification of heuristics, which are representativeness heuristic, availability heuristic and finally, anchoring and adjustment heuristic. First heuristic that needs to be discussed is Representativeness heuristic, which is when individuals go through mental shortcuts through deciding and classifying certain things into categories looking at the basis of similarities and what is relevant to the group they are classified with. This is almost always mistaken for stereotyping. The way that this is an advantage is it helps to disable prolonged cognitive process to get a quicker and simpler decision or judgment. However, this instant process would lead to individuals to disregard other information.

For instance, judging people who dress a certain way to possess a certain way of life and attitudes. Which is relevant in Brunei, where those who has mohawk hairstyles and vibrant coloured shirt and pants would less likely to be judged by their personalities or intelligence but rather a quick judgment on how they are perceived as a low life. Secondly, the cognitive or mental shortcut in which there is a expectation of an event taking place by how quickly and the frequency of recalling it. This is most likely to be a disadvantage because of the disregarding of how rare of an occurrence can happen. The best relatable example in our society would be, a bad review from people on restaurants or cafes could lead to individuals not wanting to ever go to a certain place because of a bad review. Even if the bad review came from someone who cannot stand waiting around for a long time and the person claim the restaurant or cafe to have slow customer service. Another example is, opting out of ever flying with AirAsia because of the news on plane crashes associated with the airline. The final classification of heuristic, which is anchoring and adjustment heuristic is when individuals start off roughly estimating and along the way trying to fit, alter and modify the prior rough estimation due to the fact that there are characteristics and attributes that has been taken into consideration in present circumstances. When we are making evaluative judgments, it is a norm to find or anchor our assessment eventually along whatever scale we are utilizing. We may have set up a few criteria and we might apply them as honestly as conceivable. As other information comes, we may modify our assessment. An advantage would be it allows us to move forward because we cannot possibly start fresh and reevaluate again and again. Anchoring and adjustment can indicate a development toward thorough precision, this is in a way refining initial judgments. The downside is it does not allow second chance at initial judgments. For example, bumping into someone for the first time when the person is stressed out about assignments and asking for direction from that person and the person replied with reluctance and rude remark and the next time you meet this person you will remember and still judge the person how he was the first time meeting them. But hearing from other people that he is actually a good person would challenge your view on them.

A few scholars were worried about the characteristically negative lessons picked up from the study that deviations from standardized models that will inevitably be ascribed to inadequacies of the human mind. Lopes & Oden (1991) have argued that content-blind normative models are often inappropriate and unjustified as benchmarks of rationality. Krueger and Funder (2004) called attention to that purportedly unreasonable judgments and choices can regularly be re-interpreted as far as sensible suppositions about the issue. Gigerenzer (1996) excluded single word marks like 'representativeness' as theory surrogates that neglect to put any testable imperatives on the decision making process. Moving on to the next part of the question, how are heuristics similar and dissimilar to stereotyping. First we need to discuss how it is similar to stereotyping, and this could be due to the fact that heuristics and stereotyping is both a cognitive shortcuts in which you judge and decide about certain things through classifications of what is similar to the group you have in mind. Stereotyping is when your judgement and decision is heavily influenced by how the majority of other people think of a certain group such as the ethnicity, social class, race of the group of people being questioned. And this is similar to representative heuristics.

For example, in a society like America where being a Muslim or people of colour is almost always frowned upon, it is not a surprise when white Americans bump into these groups of people they tend to be discriminatory against the people out of fear because of what is seen on the news. They tend to associate people of colour as criminals and people of certain religion as extremists. They completely disregard their personalities, intelligence, career and etc. The dissimilarity would be that heuristic is based on experiences and what is known in terms of decision making however stereotyping is an oversimplification of certain things and classifying them into groups because of a shared assumption about them. In conclusion, this heuristic method can definitely allow you to move on life quicker with mental shortcuts. However this raises a lot of criticisms regarding the this method. In any circumstances, we need to always be aware of considering the contextual situations before we decide to adapt and apply heuristics.