"Heuristics": the mental shortcuts of human thinking.

A quick and convenient answer to a complex question.

Vertebrate animals are characterized by dozens of crucial decisions in our daily lives. in our day-to-day lives. When to rest, who to interact with, when to flee and when not to flee, what a visual stimulus means... all of this is part of 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 issues that require our attention: who to vote for, where to look for a job, 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 solve them with astonishing ease and without the need to go into a nervous breakdown. How can this be explained? The answer is that, in part, we do not solve these questions as they are presented to us, but rather we take mental shortcuts called heuristics.

What is a heuristic?

In psychology, a heuristic is a rule that is followed unconsciously. unconsciously to reformulate a given problem and transform it into a simpler one that can be solved easily and almost automatically. automatically. In short, it is a kind of mental trick to guide decision-making along easier paths of thought. Think, for example, of 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, which requires deep reflection on various issues (environmental management, gender policy, anti-corruption proposals, etc.) and to which there is a very limited range of possible responses (abstention, blank vote, null vote or valid vote for one of the candidates). Clearly, reaching a decision on who to vote for according to the different criteria and parameters that appear in the electoral programs is a difficult task. So difficult that nobody does it. Instead of answering the initial question, a particularly seductive heuristic may be looming in the minds of some voters:

• Which party is made up of the most politicians I don't dislike?

This is a very different problem from the first one. So different, in fact, that it deserves a distinct name: for example, "simplified problem". This is where heuristic thinking comes in. The simplified problem includes only one dimension to be considered, a rating scale that can be expressed from 0 (I don't like everyone very much) to 10 (this party is not bad) and whose answer will be based only on subjective impressions. However, this second question has a relationship of equivalence with the previous one: we give an answer to use it 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 brainy 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 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 is guided by the logic of the involuntary heuristicThe existence of this heuristic will make it unnecessary for the voter to even 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 convenient answer to a complex question and, therefore, will forgo the pretense of spending time and resources searching for the most accurate answer. These mental shortcuts are a kind of lesser evil that is used when it is impossible to deal with each and every problem that should be faced, theoretically, by an awake and rational style of thinking. Therefore, the consequences of being guided by them are not always positive.

An example of heuristic-driven thinking

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

• Do you feel happy these days?

• How many dates did you go on last month?

The interest of this experiment was to study 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 provide results independently of what was answered to the other. However, by reversing the order of the questions and posed 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 from the first question, the easiest to answer, to the second, the resolution of which would involve thinking 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 "Do you feel happy these days?", those in the second group unconsciously replaced this question with the one they had answered seconds before, the one about dating. Thus, for them, the happiness asked about in the experiment had become a very specific type of happiness, easier to assess. That of happiness related to love life.

The case of the young Germans is not an isolated one. The question on happiness is also substituted when it is preceded by a question concerning the economic situation or the family relations of the experimental subject. In all these cases, the question that is asked first makes it easier to follow the heuristic when answering the second one thanks to a priming effect. 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, wherever there is a decision making process to which we do not devote the effort it deservesthere 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 (what does this particular Japanese person look like?What is this particular Japanese like?).

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 worthwhile to reduce the use of these cognitive shortcuts as much as possible, since they lead to biased conclusions. Gerd Gigerenzer, however, embodies a somewhat more moderate stance, and argues that heuristics can be a useful and relatively efficient way of solving problems that we would otherwise get stuck on.

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 narrow-minded ways of thinking.. Moreover, it is worrying to think what might happen if the minds behind major projects and business moves obey the power of the heuristic. It is credible, considering that it has been seen how Wall Street share prices can be influenced by the presence or absence of clouds blocking the sun.

In any case, it is clear that the empire of the heuristic 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 or not following a heuristic also seem to be important. What is certain is that, even if our brain is designed like a labyrinth in which our conscious mind is accustomed to lose itself in a thousand minute operations, our unconscious has learned to to discover and to go through many of the secret passages that remain a mystery to us.

Bibliographical references:

• Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking fast, thinking 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.