3 Ideas in 2 Minutes on Thinking More Efficiently
Mental Shortcuts, Social-Circle Heuristic & Misapplied Heuristics
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I. Mental Shortcuts
If you’re a regular reader of The Mind Collection, you’re probably familiar with the fascinating concept of mental shortcuts, aka heuristics. Here’s German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer refreshing our memory:
Heuristics are efficient cognitive processes, conscious or unconscious, that ignore part of the information. Because using heuristics saves effort, the classical view has been that heuristic decisions imply greater errors than do "rational" decisions as defined by logic or statistical models. However, for many decisions, the assumptions of rational models are not met, and it is an empirical rather than an a priori issue how well cognitive heuristics function in an uncertain world.
—Gerd Gigerenzer, Heuristic Decision Making
In other words, there are occasions when taking mental shortcuts can lead to more accurate judgements than going through a lengthy reasoning process.
II. Social-Circle Heuristic
Should you learn to play chess or a new instrument? When we use the Social-Circle Heuristic, we don’t embark on a long-winded process of soul-searching and reasoning to answer such questions. Instead, we infer the best option of two alternatives by considering our current social circle.
This involves taking into account the beliefs, attitudes, and opinions of the people who are close to us. We rely on their collective wisdom so to speak. This heuristic is especially useful when we’re unfamiliar with the particular problem we’re trying to solve. It can help us to gain insight into the best solution quickly and accurately.
Let’s say most of the people we hang out with are musicians. That’ll end our search quickly as we’ll probably decide to go learn an instrument. Reminiscent of the theory of mimetic desire, the quality of our choices seems to depend heavily on other people.
III. Misapplied Heuristics
Truth be told, mental shortcuts can also lead to poor decisions. This is particularly fateful when what we were after was an in-depth analysis of a situation.
In this context, former intelligence analyst Randy Pherson warns of Misapplied Heuristics that “can impede analytic thinking”. Satisficing, for example, can make us accept a first answer because it seems just good enough.
Pherson’s solution to mitigate the misapplication of mental shortcuts is the use of rigorous structured analytic techniques such as Premortem Analysis. 🐘
Have a great week,
Chris
themindcollection.com