Blog Entry one – Heuristic

Noah Swart

EH – 2000

The Thought Process

Heuristic is an approach to a problem or a learning situation or something that is discovered that needs a new approach to be understood. Heuristic employs a practical method to solve something, the heuristic method however isn’t always the most logical way nor is it optimal. Due to the way heuristic method presents themselves this can lead to a bias. Although, is not always prevalent in heuristic problem solving. This bias can still show itself quite often, an example would be educated guessing. Educated guessing is the process of taking a multiple choice question and breaking it down realistically using the common knowledge that is known to the user.

How does this present a bias? When the user is basing his answer off of an answer or question that has been presented to him before, and how is the user to know if that question was right or if he absorbed the wrong form of the answer. Another example, would be using common sense to solve a problem, this of course doesn’t have a huge amount of bias structured into it but some can still be prevalent.

The term using common sense refers to looking at the problem or situation from a situational stand point. You think about how the normal person would behave or how a perfectly logical person would handle the situation and you go from there. Heuristics in its most basic form is just a simple thought process that leads us to make the simple decisions we do. People rely on how easy it is to making a decision without stressing the brain to think through the process.

Stressing 

 However, there are two types of heuristic problem solving, those being availability heuristics and representative heuristics. Availability heuristics is the process of making a decision based on your already base knowledge, the example of educated guessing is an availability heuristics because you’ll bring up past problems or events that remind you of the problem and critically analyze how to solve it. Meanwhile, representative heuristics is the process of looking at the average or stereotype of something and comparing it to the problem you have now.

Heuristics is just a basic process of the human brain, however it can be seen as something of a short cut like most short cuts it isn’t foolproof. As we use heuristics in our daily lives we must also look through and be able to spot the signs of bias and logical faults in our constant problematic situations.