PSYC 2000 : Test 3 Completed Study Guide
Document Summary
The existence of heuristics, or cognitive shortcuts, and biases, like the confirmation bias, suggest that people are not always completely logical when making decisions. A heuristic, or rule of thumb, is an educated guess based on prior experiences that helps narrow down the possible solutions to a problem. Two common heuristics are the representative heuristic and the availability heuristic. The representative heuristic is an assumption that any object (or person) sharing characteristics with the members of a particular category is also a member of that category. The availability heuristic estimates the frequency or likelihood of an event based on how easy it is to recall relevant information from memory or how easy it is for us to think of related examples. Ex: how many words begin with k in a book versus how many words have k as the second letter.
