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Any simple, efficient rule that people use to form judgments and make decisions. Heuristics are mental shortcuts that usually involve focusing on one aspect of a complex problem and ignoring others. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman discusses common heuristics that people use, which often expose them to making mistakes. Examples of different heuristics that Kahneman mentions include the halo effect, the planning fallacy, and the hindsight illusion.
Heuristic Quotes in Thinking, Fast and Slow
The Thinking, Fast and Slow quotes below are all either spoken by Heuristic or refer to Heuristic. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Part 1, Chapter 1
Quotes
Constantly questioning our own thinking would be impossibly tedious, and System 2 is much too slow and inefficient to serve as a substitute for System I in making routine decisions. The best we can do is a compromise: learn to recognize situations in which mistakes are likely and try harder to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes are high.
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Part 1, Chapter 3
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The bat-and-ball problem is our first encounter with an observation that will be a recurrent theme of this book: many people are overconfident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions.
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The investment of attention improves performance in numerous activities—think of the risks of driving through a narrow space while your mind is wandering—and is essential to some tasks, including comparison, choice, and ordered reasoning. However, System 2 is not a paragon of rationality. Its abilities are limited and so is the knowledge to which it has access.
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Heuristic Term Timeline in Thinking, Fast and Slow
The timeline below shows where the term Heuristic appears in Thinking, Fast and Slow. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Part 1, Chapter 9
...come to conclusions, rather than considering new arguments. Psychologist Paul Slovic has proposed an “affect heuristic,” in which people let their likes and dislikes determine their beliefs about the world. If...
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Part 2, Chapter 12
...and Tversky spent 1971-72 at the Oregon Research Institute, studying what they called the “availability heuristic.” This heuristic describes the thought process that people use when they estimate the frequency of...
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The availability heuristic substitutes the question “how frequent or how sizeable is this category?” with “how easily can...
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Part 2, Chapter 13
Paul Slovic eventually developed the notion of the affect heuristic, in which people substitute the question “What do I think about it?” with “How do...
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Part 2, Chapter 18
...and expertise (like chess masters) but some of them can stem from the operation of heuristics, which can lead to mistakes.
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Conclusions
Ultimately, having a vocabulary for the different heuristics is also important in avoiding their errors. Labels like “anchoring effects,” “narrow framing,” or “excessive...
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