Fast and Frugal Heuristics
Judgment and decision making is possibly one of the most interesting topics within science of psychology. One might ask why is it so important to study or understand judgment and decision making. Well, certainly there will be different answers to this question, however, many will agree that judgment and decision making is part of our every day life. According to definition on Webster’s dictionary, on one hand, judgment is defined as “the mental or intellectual process of forming an opinion or evaluation by discerning and comparing” on the other hand, decision making is defined as “the act of settling or terminating …by giving judgment”. (Arkes et al, 2000)
So according to this definition judgment is seen as evaluation or estimates, while decision making indicates an intention to pursue a particular course of actions. Judgment and decision making are the two things that cannot be taken apart due to the fact that most of decisions we make are related to the judgments we make. As any science there are many different theories of judgment and decision making however, this week we analysed the Probabilistic Mental Models of judgment and decision making (PMM JDM). According to this theory when individuals are incapable to identify between two different alternatives they will then begin to search for cues that will help them to choose one alternative over another. This theory is known as Fast and Frugal Heuristics, which was developed by Gigerenzer et al. We might sometimes find ourselves in a situation where the time and our knowledge is limited to make certain decisions, so therefore, we use fast and frugal heuristics to help us make a decision. The central key of this theory is known as ‘take the best option and ignore the rest’. Although, we have learned that heuristics can lead to errors, Gigerenzer et al (2000) argue that heuristics are often of great importance. They believe that recognition heuristics is in fact one of the most important part of ‘take-the-best tactic because when we recognise one or more objects amongst another we then tend to give more value to the recognised objects.
In order to prove their theory Gigerenzer et al (2000), conducted experiment where they asked students to identify from different cities and decide which one of then has more population. As expected the students used their recognition heuristics to make decision, however, their experiment was criticised as being insignificant due to the fact that this could be the only information available for the participants at the time of decision making. Despite the criticisms fast and frugal heuristics (recognition heuristics and take- the- best) proved to be very useful even though the individual have little knowledge about the subject.
So according to this definition judgment is seen as evaluation or estimates, while decision making indicates an intention to pursue a particular course of actions. Judgment and decision making are the two things that cannot be taken apart due to the fact that most of decisions we make are related to the judgments we make. As any science there are many different theories of judgment and decision making however, this week we analysed the Probabilistic Mental Models of judgment and decision making (PMM JDM). According to this theory when individuals are incapable to identify between two different alternatives they will then begin to search for cues that will help them to choose one alternative over another. This theory is known as Fast and Frugal Heuristics, which was developed by Gigerenzer et al. We might sometimes find ourselves in a situation where the time and our knowledge is limited to make certain decisions, so therefore, we use fast and frugal heuristics to help us make a decision. The central key of this theory is known as ‘take the best option and ignore the rest’. Although, we have learned that heuristics can lead to errors, Gigerenzer et al (2000) argue that heuristics are often of great importance. They believe that recognition heuristics is in fact one of the most important part of ‘take-the-best tactic because when we recognise one or more objects amongst another we then tend to give more value to the recognised objects.
In order to prove their theory Gigerenzer et al (2000), conducted experiment where they asked students to identify from different cities and decide which one of then has more population. As expected the students used their recognition heuristics to make decision, however, their experiment was criticised as being insignificant due to the fact that this could be the only information available for the participants at the time of decision making. Despite the criticisms fast and frugal heuristics (recognition heuristics and take- the- best) proved to be very useful even though the individual have little knowledge about the subject.
