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date: 17 June 2021

Abstract and Keywords

This article examines the role of heuristics in driving social action, focusing on the simple heuristics that people use in their everyday lives: the Recognition Heuristic and the Take-the-best Heuristic. It first describes recognition-based inference and knowledge-based inference before discussing how fast-and-frugal heuristics are being employed as models of both individual and group decision-making. It then describes social heuristics, with particular emphasis on the role of recognition heuristic in groups, along with knowledge aggregation in groups. It also explores how cue orders are learned socially and provides examples of how simple heuristics might account for complex behavior, how they can serve as robust models, and how they can make counterintuitive predictions. The article concludes by identifying factors that determine whether a heuristic will be successful as well as the conditions that give rise to actors’ switching heuristics.

Keywords: heuristics, social action, Recognition Heuristic, Take-the-best Heuristic, recognition, inference, fast-and-frugal heuristics, decision-making, social heuristics, knowledge aggregation

Dan Goldstein

Daniel G. Goldstein is Assistant Professor of Marketing at London Business School. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and previously he has been at Columbia, Harvard, and Stanford universities and at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin. His expertise is in psychology and decision-making, with an emphasis on business and policy. He is on the executive board of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making and is the editor of Decision Science News.

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