Heuristics Explained
Heuristics are mental shortcuts for fast decisions: availability judges by what comes to mind, representativeness by similarity to stereotypes.
January 2026
January 2025
Anchoring and Adjustment: Why the First Number You Hear Shapes Every Number That Follows
Tversky and Kahneman spun a rigged wheel that landed on either 10 or 65, then asked subjects how many African countries are in the United Nations. Subjects who saw 65 guessed 45. Subjects who saw 10 guessed 25. The wheel had nothing to do with the question. Anchoring and adjustment: the cognitive process of starting from an initial value and adjusting insufficiently — leaving estimates biased toward wherever the starting point happened to be.
December 2024
The Affect Heuristic: How Feelings Become Facts About Risk
Paul Slovic found that people who feel positively about nuclear power judge its risks as low and its benefits as high. People who feel negatively judge risks as high and benefits as low. The correlation between perceived risk and perceived benefit is strongly negative — as if people decide how they feel about a technology and then construct their risk and benefit estimates to match. The affect heuristic: when we don't know how risky something is, we ask how we feel about it instead.
The Representativeness Heuristic: Why We Judge by Resemblance and Pay the Price
Linda is 31, outspoken, a philosophy major, passionate about social justice. Is she more likely to be a bank teller, or a bank teller active in the feminist movement? 85-90% of people choose the conjunction — which is mathematically impossible. Kahneman and Tversky called this the representativeness heuristic: we judge probability by resemblance, and resemblance ignores base rates.
November 2024
The Anchoring Bias: How the First Number You Hear Colonizes Your Mind
In 1974, Kahneman and Tversky spun a rigged wheel in front of subjects — who knew it was rigged — and it still bent their estimates. The first number you encounter doesn't just inform your judgment. It partly constitutes it. The science behind one of the most pervasive and hard-to-defeat biases in human cognition.
The Availability Heuristic: Why What Comes to Mind Feels Like What Is True
Tversky and Kahneman asked subjects whether more English words begin with the letter K or have K as their third letter. Most said K-first — wrong by a factor of three. Words starting with K are just easier to retrieve. The availability heuristic: we judge probability and frequency by how easily examples come to mind, not by how common they actually are. The science behind risk misperception, media effects, and why we fear the wrong things.