Decision Making Essays

Submitted By dmidkiff82
Words: 423
Pages: 2

Heuristics are used to reduce the mental effort in decision making. Availability heuristics are used to judge the frequency or likelihood of something using mental shortcuts to immediate examples that come to mind rather than think about other alternatives. The availability heuristic can be ver useful in decision-making because it is easy for our minds to recall frequent instances easily compared to rare instances leading to accurate judgements. However this heuristic also has negative aspect because there are different factors that effect each event separately. So the instance that you recall may be similar to the instance of judgement in present time but there could be different factors that can make the current event be completely different. Representativeness heuristic is used to judge people or things based on traits that may correspond with previously formed stereotypes. For example say a man wants to build a house. He only wants white men to build his home because he had a bad experience with a hispanic crew who built a shed for him in the past and he had a white crew come and fix it with ease. So he hires an all white crew to build his home based on his opinions and stereotypes. So that is using representativeness heuristics. But as with almost everything there is also a negative side to this heuristic as well. Back to the example - Even though the man hired a white crew to build his home there really is no guarantee what he will get. The crew could come in and create more problems that he ever had when he had the hispanic crew. He was simply