- The Oxford Handbook of Analytical Sociology
- Acknowledgments
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- About the Contributors
- What is Analytical Sociology All About? An Introductory Essay
- Analytical Sociology and Theories of the Middle Range
- Emotions
- Beliefs
- Preferences
- Opportunities
- Heuristics
- Signaling
- Norms
- Trust
- Social Dynamics from the Bottom Up: Agent-Based Models of Social Interaction
- Segregation Dynamics
- Self-Fulfilling Prophecies
- Social Influence: The Puzzling Nature of Success in Cultural Markets
- The Contagiousness of Divorce
- Matching
- Collective Action
- Conditional Choice
- Network Dynamics
- Threshold Models of Social Influence
- Time and Scheduling
- Homophily and the Focused Organization of Ties
- Status
- Dominance Hierarchies
- Conflict
- Game Theory
- Experiments
- Surveys
- Analytic Ethnography
- Historical Sociology
- Name Index
- Subject Index
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
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.
Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.
Please subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.
For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can''t find the answer there, please contact us.
- The Oxford Handbook of Analytical Sociology
- Acknowledgments
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- About the Contributors
- What is Analytical Sociology All About? An Introductory Essay
- Analytical Sociology and Theories of the Middle Range
- Emotions
- Beliefs
- Preferences
- Opportunities
- Heuristics
- Signaling
- Norms
- Trust
- Social Dynamics from the Bottom Up: Agent-Based Models of Social Interaction
- Segregation Dynamics
- Self-Fulfilling Prophecies
- Social Influence: The Puzzling Nature of Success in Cultural Markets
- The Contagiousness of Divorce
- Matching
- Collective Action
- Conditional Choice
- Network Dynamics
- Threshold Models of Social Influence
- Time and Scheduling
- Homophily and the Focused Organization of Ties
- Status
- Dominance Hierarchies
- Conflict
- Game Theory
- Experiments
- Surveys
- Analytic Ethnography
- Historical Sociology
- Name Index
- Subject Index