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What Are Heuristics and Cognitive Biases?

Heuristics and Cognitive Biases: Efficient Judgement with Predictable Limitations

Heuristics are simplifying strategies that allow people to make judgements without examining every possibility or performing a complete calculation. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky showed how these indispensable shortcuts can also produce cognitive biases: systematic departures from an appropriate standard of judgement.

The availability heuristic judges likelihood partly by how easily examples come to mind. Vivid, recent, emotional, or heavily reported events may therefore seem more common than they are, while familiar but less memorable hazards can be underestimated.

Representativeness judges a case by its similarity to a category or pattern. It can support rapid recognition but may encourage neglect of base rates, sample size, regression towards the mean, and the possibility that a compelling story is statistically improbable.

Anchoring occurs when an initial value or framing influences later estimates, even when the starting point is arbitrary. Confirmation bias, hindsight bias, overconfidence, and escalation of commitment similarly affect which evidence is sought, interpreted, remembered, or discounted.

Biases cannot be removed merely by telling people to be rational. Useful safeguards include independent estimates, reference-class data, explicit alternatives, pre-mortems, structured challenge, calibrated feedback, and separating the generation of options from their evaluation.

A heuristic is not automatically an error. Its value depends on the environment, experience, available feedback, and cost of analysis. Good decision processes preserve efficient intuition while introducing checks where predictable bias could materially affect outcomes.