Behavioural Economics Primer: Heuristics
Crawford Hollingworth The Behavioural Architects
Behavioural economics
This article is part of Warc's Behavioural Economics Primer.
Heuristics are shortcuts or rules of thumb for decision-making to aid us in finding a quick, satisfactory, but perhaps not perfect, answer to a complex question.
People frequently use heuristics so they don't have to go through the mental effort of carefully searching for an optimal solution where a less than optimal solution will do just fine. Understood from an evolutionary perspective this makes sense; thinking is metabolically costly and time-consuming, and so cheap 'good-enough' solutions can...