Episode 32: Heuristics: How Our Brains Get Through the Day Without Exploding

In this episode, April admits that she doesn't always calmly and rationally think things through; but hey, neither do you. Why? Heuristics, that's why. She discusses these handy, if sometimes problematic, mental shortcuts that help get us through the day without our brains literally exploding. And by literally, I mean figuratively; but literally sounds better, plus it makes a great mental image--KABOOM!!!

Episode 32 Show Notes:

I've recommended Daniel Kahneman's book before, and I'll probably do it again:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11468377-thinking-fast-and-slow

Interesting article about the history and origins of heuristics: https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-a-heuristic-2795235

A basic discussion of heuristics:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/heuristics

Dr. Weinberger's blog explaining our unconscious mind: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-unconscious/202001/how-the-unconscious-works

An easy to read but fairly comprehensive article discussing many aspects of heuristics, including the different types of heuristics and when our brain is likely to use them: https://www.simplypsychology.org/what-is-a-heuristic.html

You're probably aware that some of these jobs are dangerous, but others may surprise you with their position on this list: https://www.ishn.com/articles/112748-top-25-most-dangerous-jobs-in-the-united-states

The Decision Lab's article goes into some detail about how our brains use heuristics:
https://thedecisionlab.com/insights/society/tdl-perspectives-what-are-heuristics

Over-reliance on heuristics can lead to stereotyping in the workplace: https://www.engagetu.com/2020/01/28/heuristics-and-workplace-bias/

Kendra Cherry's excellent article about decision making: https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-the-affect-heuristic-2795028#:~:text=The%20affect%20heuristic%20is%20a%20type%20of%20mental,role%20in%20the%20choices%20and%20decisions%20you%20make

Transcript

Episode 33: Heuristics: how our brains get through the day without exploding

Hi and welcome to episode 33 of think it through.

Let’s start with a few questions—does your brain hurt after a long day at work or school or dealing with your family or whatever it is you’re doing? Do you often think you might not be able to handle one more customer, or question from your kids, or some problem with your spouse or significant other without your brain literally exploding? If you said yes to any of those, I totally get it. Stop for a moment though, and ask yourself this question—what would happen if, for every one of those interactions or thoughts or problems that you had to deal with, you were forced to stop and consider every single aspect of that issue, every possible piece of evidence that would support or refute your conclusions, and all the potential outcomes of every possible solution? How much time and effort would it take to do that? And would your brain, as awesome as it is, be able to handle that? My guess is no. It’s hard enough to make it through the day as it is. If we had to use what Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman, author of the book “Thinking Fast and Slow,” refers to as “slow thinking,” to respond to every single decision that we make every day, we simply would not have the time or energy to do it.

Now you might think this sounds a bit weird for me, COM teacher April, whose entire being apparently revolves around calmly and rationally thinking things through, to say that sometimes you don’t have the time or energy to do that. Well let me tell you right now, I don’t always calmly and rationally think things through, as anyone who knows me can tell you. In fact, just like you, for the vast majority of my day I am using what are called heuristics to quickly come to conclusions, make decisions, and just get on with the business of living. Other terms to describe these processes could be “Type 1 thinking,” “fast thinking,” “intuitive thinking,” “rules of thumb,” “gut reactions,” and even “jumping to conclusions.” These are all ways to describe the mental shortcuts we use to make decisions in a short amount of time.

Way back in Episode 1 I briefly discussed heuristics but, in this episode, we will be going into them in more detail--what they are and how they work in our brains to keep us going, how helpful they can be, and how they also lead to things like biases, discrimination, and bad decisions. And those things can cause problems in our relationships at home and our interactions out in the world. Once you can recognize them, though, there are ways to keep heuristics from impacting our lives and relationships negatively.

Ok, let’s get started.

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Nobel-prize winner Herbert Simon, an economist and cognitive psychologist, first put forth the concept of heuristics back in the 1950’s. According to him, humans generally prefer to be rational and make conscious decisions; however, factors such as time, limited information, overall intelligence, and perceptual accuracy combine to make it impossible to truly weigh all the potential costs and benefits of every alternative to every decision we need to make. As we go throughout our day, our brains must attempt to process an enormous amount of information and make a large number of choices in a limited period of time. Fortunately, that’s exactly what our brains are designed to do, and we do it through heuristics. According to Psychology Today, heuristics are “mental shortcuts that allow an individual to make a decision, pass judgment, and solve a problem quickly and with minimal effort.” Dr. Joel Weinberger, author of the article “How the unconscious works,” says these kinds of processes underlie most of our functioning. Our minds have evolved to become organized, as he says, “into associatively connected networks of ideas, thoughts, motivations, and emotions.”  Since birth we have been learning by establishing and strengthening these connections, until they function quickly and efficiently in what psychologists call “automaticity.” There are far too many of these networks for us to be consciously aware of them on a regular basis. Sure, you’re thinking about them right now but that’s because I’ve brought them to your attention; however, in our daily lives they stay in the background, doing their jobs. So much of what we “know” and “remember” is part of these unconscious processes. 

Heuristics are critical to problem-solving and decision making, especially if it needs to be done quickly. And the necessity for making quick decisions or finding quick solutions happens many times over the course of a day. You need answers to questions like, what are you going to wear to work today? Should you walk, drive, or take the bus to work? What should you eat for lunch? What should you pick up at the store on the way home from work? Should you stop with your work friends and have a drink before heading home? Where should you go for that drink?  

Now you might be thinking, in the great scheme of things, none of those are very important. And frankly, that’s one of the reasons that we depend on heuristics. If you had to go through your entire closet every morning to look at all the possibilities of outfits and use your critical reasoning skills to narrow them down to the best alternative, or if you had to look up information on every possible lunch restaurant or bar in order to rationally come to the best solution about where to go for lunch or drinks, or go down every aisle of the grocery store and look at every available item on every shelf in order to determine exactly what you need to buy, imagine the time and energy that would have to go into those decisions—you wouldn’t have any time or energy left to actually go to work and get anything important done. That’s what heuristics do for you, and it’s kind of amazing that our brains are designed to come to lots of these smaller conclusions quickly and efficiently, leaving us the ability to use our energy to focus on bigger and potentially more important decisions.

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When do heuristics come into play? According to Anthony Pratkanis, professor emeritus of psychology at UC Santa Cruz, there are five reasons that your mind might use heuristics. These include: 

1.     When you’re faced with too much information—as I said before, our brains can get overwhelmed with incoming data. Shortcuts can alleviate this problem by ignoring most of that and jumping to a conclusion.

2.     When time to make a decision is limited—there are only so many hours in the day and we simply don’t have time to think deeply about some things, even if we maybe ought to take the time.

3.     When the decision to be made is considered unimportant—Yep, if it’s not an earth-shattering issue, it’s much more efficient to come to a conclusion about it quickly. This is probably the best and most justifiable use of heuristics.

4.     When there isn’t enough information available to make a considered decision—this one might be a problem, if we maybe need more information but we don’t have time to find it, we end up having to use the available information or our own personal experience to come to a decision.

5.     When an appropriate heuristic comes into the mind at the same moment we need to make a decision—our brain goes into automatic mode, and we use the easiest and most available heuristic to come to a conclusion. So it’s more habitual than anything else.

To sum that up, the five reasons are—our brain is overloaded with too much information, we only have a limited time, the decision is about something unimportant, we don’t have enough information, and it’s habitual and something we do automatically.

So we know the definition of heuristics and when our brain uses them. But what exactly are they? There are many different types of heuristics, but psychologists disagree on exactly how many. So let’s look at a few of them to see how they function:

·      The first one we will look at is the Availability heuristic—this heuristic describes our ability to make choices based on what springs immediately to our mind. So the first thing we think of is often the thing we use to come to a conclusion. Let’s say I am at the store, looking for some canned tomatoes so I can make spaghetti sauce, but there are like 20 different brands and I don’t really want to stand around and look at all the options, so I might just choose a brand that I immediately recognize because I’ve seen a recent advertisement for it on my favorite cooking show. And that might be a perfectly good choice, because it saved me the time of looking at all the labels and prices, and it is probably a decent quality product.  In that circumstance, the availability heuristic can certainly be an effective way of thinking. But utilizing this heuristic doesn’t always lead to a correct conclusion. Here’s a hypothetical situation: you’re a young person trying to decide whether to apply to the police academy, but your mom is adamant that you do something less dangerous. She’s got a friend whose husband owns a tree trimming service and she says she can get you a job for the summer and you might end up liking that better. She’d be much happier if you decided on that line of work, because tree trimming is a much safer occupation…Or is it? What is the more dangerous job? You might immediately think of news reports that you’ve seen about police officers who have been killed or hurt in the line of duty, and so it just seems obvious to assume that your mom is right to be concerned. But tree trimmers are far more likely to be injured or even killed at work than police officers. Because the available information in your brain is all about police officers getting hurt or killed in the line of duty, and you can’t remember the last time (if ever) that you heard about a tree trimmer getting hurt, that’s where your thought process immediately goes. But the availability heuristic led you to an incorrect conclusion.

·      Another type of heuristic is the Familiarity heuristic—This is used because we tend to favor things that we are familiar with over things that are novel. We’d rather stick with something we know than try something we don’t know. How would this work with my canned tomato example? The next time I go to the store, and probably all the times after that, I will very likely pick up the brand of canned tomatoes that I got before. I’m familiar with it, it works for my recipes, and unless some random thing happens and I no longer have access to that brand, I’ll probably keep getting it. Advertisers are very familiar with this kind of consumer behavior; they know that once you’ve tried a product and been satisfied with it, it’s very likely you’re going to have “brand loyalty” for that product and keep choosing it. One of the down sides of this heuristic is that there may be another choice that is equally good or effective, but because we prefer the familiar we are unlikely to change. It may not be that important if it’s just about canned tomatoes, but what if it was about your health? Let’s say you have a medical condition and your doctor prescribes a name-brand medication that they are familiar with, but it’s very expensive. There might be a generic brand that is basically the same thing but costs much less, but you and your doctor stick with what’s familiar. Sometimes doing the new and novel thing is the better choice, but it does take time and energy to determine if that change is one that will work for you.

·      Then we have the representativeness heuristic—this involves making a decision by comparing the present situation to a representative mental prototype. We tend to categorize people and objects, putting them in mental “boxes,” so to speak. You might not think that you categorize people, but you do, mostly unconsciously. And this can save time and energy because similarities between people in one aspect can sometimes mean they are similar in other ways as well…but not always. The Very Well Mind article, “What are heuristics?” uses the example of immediately trusting an older woman you just met because she reminds you of your grandma, who you already know and trust. And then you might immediately dislike someone, maybe your new work colleague, because they look just like your old boyfriend, and that guy was a jerk! Now, that older lady might indeed be a sweetheart, and your new work colleague might indeed be a jerk, but it’s just as likely that neither of those things is the case. A lot of our implicit biases about other groups of people come from our tendency to categorize; this heuristic, in particular, can reinforce our stereotypes about people and lead to discrimination, which is one of its major downfalls. 

·      The last heuristic we’ll talk about is the affect heuristic—which has to do with using our current emotional state as the basis for making a decision. Back in Episode 1, which is titled “Feelings Come First,” you see that many of our decisions are based on our feelings about the thing we are considering. The VeryWell article says that our ideas about the relative “goodness” or “badness” of someone or something will impact the decision that we make about that person or thing. And researchers have found that the more positive our emotional state is at the moment, the more likely we are to perceive an activity as having high benefits and low risks (even if that isn’t actually the case); so if we are out with our friends, having fun and feeling very positive, we might do something that isn’t in our best interests, like drinking too much and driving home—we see that activity as having high benefits (fun with our friends), and the driving home afterwards as low risk (because we are feeling positive and we think we can drive just fine even if we’re buzzed). Conversely, the more negative we feel, the more likely we see an activity as having low benefits and higher risks. Negative emotions like fear are often used by people who are trying to persuade us to have a particular viewpoint or do a particular thing, so if we feel fear about something like getting a vaccine, we might jump to the conclusion (based on that fear) that getting a shot has little or no benefit and possibly higher risk. Emotions are a powerful motivator, and while it’s often good to take them into account, using them as reasons to do something may not necessarily be the best idea.

There are a lot of other heuristics besides the ones I’ve mentioned, and I’ll post some links describing them in the show notes. As you can see, heuristics have positive aspects and are important enough that we use them on a regular basis. But I hope you can also see that they may lead us to some incorrect, and possibly even dangerous, conclusions.

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As we’ve seen, heuristics are necessary mental shortcuts that help us make choices and draw conclusions quickly and efficiently, but they come with some potentially negative aspects, including poor decision-making, biases, and discrimination. What can we do to mitigate the negative impact of heuristics while still recognizing their effectiveness and allowing them to help us? Julian Hazell and Sekoul Krastev of The Decision Lab say that heuristics are neither good nor bad, it’s all in how and when we use them.

One of the major considerations they discuss is whether speed or accuracy is important in making any decision. If a decision needs to be reached immediately, then heuristics may indeed be necessary. On the other hand, if accuracy is the most important consideration, then using type 2 slow thinking, which incorporates deliberate and careful thought based on evidence, is the way to go. The problem with this is, it can take time just to figure out if you need to take the time to make a decision. And if you remember, earlier in the episode we learned the 5 reasons that we use heuretics? Well, the fifth reason was that “one just springs to mind and we go into automatic mode” and use it because we can. It’s habitual, but also might be just a bit intellectually lazy. Maybe a decision does not need to be expedited; maybe it would benefit from slower, evidence-based reasoning. 

Faizan Imtiaz, Leadership and Organizational Development professor at Towson University, believes that solutions such as implicit bias training can be implemented in workplaces to help reduce the stereotyping and discrimination that spring from an overreliance on heuristics, especially the representativeness heuristic. I’ll post some links that describe this kind of training in the show notes. Verywell contributor and psychology educator Kendra Cherry says that there are several ways to improve our decision-making skills. For instance, you might need to step away for a moment or two and take a few deep breaths before returning to the situation. Maybe just taking a few seconds before deciding can help you avoid an error in judgment. Also, try to determine if your decision only affects you, or are other people involved? If your decision needs to take others into account, is there a common goal that can serve everyone involved? She also says that just being aware that the affect heuristic exists can help us to make better, more clear-headed decisions. She encourages people who find themselves making a decision based on how they’re feeling to talk silently to themselves in the third person. So, if I should recognize that I’m caught up in the heat of the moment and ready to do or say something based on my emotions and little else, I need to stop and say to myself, “ok, April, are you being reasonable? Is this a good way to come to a conclusion, or are you about to do or say something dumb?”…boy, looking back on my life there are times I really could have used this technique. Oh well…at least you all know about it now. Finally, Kendra Cherry says you need to recognize that heuristics might lead you to all-or-nothing (aka black or white) thinking, which is thinking in extremes and absolutes. It’s a negative thinking pattern that can cause you to jump to a conclusion that you see as the only way to look at something, when the reality is much more nuanced and there may be many more choices and possibilities involved that you didn’t consider. Again, just understanding that it could be a problem if we rely too heavily on heuristics can be enough to get you to stop—and think a little more slowly and rationally.

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In the end, humans generally want to be rational creatures and make rational decisions. And we certainly have the capacity to do that; however, we do tend to use heuristics to come to decisions quickly. While those decisions are often perfectly fine, heuristics may end up being used when they probably shouldn’t be, and the result is often neither helpful nor effective. We need to be able to determine whether speed or accuracy is the most important thing when making a decision, understand that things like stereotyping and bias can arise when relying on heuristics, and recognize when a decision that comes quickly might be based more on habit or emotion than on any rational thought. Fortunately, there are things that we can do to reduce our overuse of heuristics, like implicit bias training, taking a few deep breaths or doing a little self-talk before making a decision, and just simply recognizing and acknowledging our tendency to jump to conclusions. And if you put those ideas to work in your life you’ll be exemplifying the very essence of this podcast as you “Think It Through.”