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Lecture Notes

Often when we're presented with information, whether you're reading it on a website or in a book, something's communicated from a friend, what's going to happen is that we're going to think through or process that with the use of heuristics. These are mental short cuts, they're rules of thumb. Whereas an algorithm is going to present a correct solution if it exists, with a heuristic it's something that's probably but not necessarily correct or true. So they can at times lead us astray because they also bias our thinking and lead to some of those errors, and we want to talk about three common but problematic heuristics that we use all the of the time, and that would be the anchoring heuristic, the representativeness heuristic and availability heuristic.