Heuristic

A heuristic is a higher-order psychological adaptation, a useful mental shortcut, an approximation, or a rule-of-thumb, specialised for certain classes of problem, for guiding search and enabling adaptive decision making. Simple heuristics can be used singly and in combination to account for a great variety of higher order mental processes that may at first glance seem to require more complex explanation. This observation led Gigerenzer, et al., (1999) to formulate the basic idea of the adaptive toolbox: the collection of specialised cognitive mechanisms that evolution has built into the human mind for specific domains of inference and reasoning, including fast and frugal heuristics (Gigerenzer, et al., 1999: 25-31). Also see adaptive toolbox.