heuristic |
Working Definition:
Heuristics refer to the mental shortcuts people use to make judgments quickly and efficiently. Heuristic refers to "cycles of inquiry" wherein an answer to a question implicitly raises another question.
Disciplinary Definitions:
Heuristic: A rule of thumb that does not guarantee the conrrct answer to a problem but offers a likely shortcut to it. Kosslyn & Rosenberg, Fundamentals of Pyschology, G6.
Comments:
These heuristics seem to be one-time inferences made in a particular situation that have become a template for similar situations. Heuristics may be related to the phenomenon I’ve been calling configuring. The availability heuristic is an interesting case in point (Aronson, et. al., 1999, 83) However, whereas the schema in an availability heuristic can be a set of symptoms, in configuring, it is interpersonal. Why this special focus? The difference is between a concept (a set of symptoms related to a specific disease) and a mythos—a narrative schema concerning interpersonal relations. The representativeness heuristic is close to configuring but has a significant difference. In it, an individual is judged to be a member of a type of person. Here it is simply type and trait, not interaction. In this text, it would seem, analogs are avoided in favor of classifications.
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last revised:
June 13, 2007
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