Heurístics

Heurístics (also spelled heuristics) are mental shortcuts or simple rules of thumb that people use to form judgments and make decisions quickly under conditions of uncertainty. The term comes from the Greek heuriskein, meaning to discover or find, and in psychology and related fields it denotes efficient, experience-based strategies rather than exhaustive analysis.

Heurístics operate within bounded rationality, offering plausible conclusions with minimal cognitive effort. They allow rapid estimation when information is incomplete and time is limited, but they can lead to systematic errors or biases when misapplied or when rare events dominate memory.

Common heurístics include the availability heuristic, in which judgments are influenced by information that is most easily recalled; the representativeness heuristic, which assesses probability by similarity to a category prototype; and anchoring and adjustment, where people rely on an initial value and adjust too little.

Other examples are the recognition heuristic and the affect heuristic, in which recognition or emotion guides decisions. Satisficing, a related concept introduced by Herbert Simon, describes choosing a solution that is good enough rather than optimal.

In applied contexts such as artificial intelligence and operations research, heurístics are methods for finding good-enough solutions quickly when exact optimization is impractical. They play a central role in problem solving, decision support, and risk assessment, while remaining subject to biases and limitations.