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Heuristic Hacks

Improve your heuristic decision making

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Recognition Heuristic

Recognition Heuristic is a model of memory-based inferences, which means that if an individual had to make a decision based on two options, they’ll prioritize the one they recognize over the other. For example, if someone asked whether New York or Sana has a higher population, they would answer New York if Sana was unfamiliar to them.

According to research, Recognition Heuristic reduces effort in making judgments by relying on one single cue (whatever sparks a connection in our memory) and ignoring other information. Due to our overreliance on recognition, we risk picking an option that might not be correlated with the outcome we want.

How to hack Recognition Heuristic?

In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman shares that Recognition Heuristic causes us to approach new decisions with new information by relying on historical information that may or may not be relevant to the decision at hand.

In other words, replicating any decision that was made in the past will automatically bias you toward it. This leads to errors in judgment, finding solutions, and decision-making. However, by employing deliberate decision-making based on conscious mental effort and reasoning, we can de-bias ourselves from Recognition Heuristic.

Hacking Recognition Heuristic in medications

If we are shopping for over-the-counter allergy medications, and we spot two objectively equal medications but recognize one, then we will think that it should be better. Obviously, the medications we recognize will be determined by factors like advertisements, where we live, and what doctors we have gone to.

This means we are selecting our medications based on factors other than cost, quality, side effects, or time it takes to kick in. You can hack Recognition Heuristic by increasing your awareness of the bias and doing a side-by-side comparison of the medications based on the most important factors to you.

Do you think that you relate to this hacks? Learn how to bias this and more

Hacking Recognition Heuristic for test-taking

We have all been there. Staring at a test completely unprepared to answer the questions. Have you ever been told to stick with your first choice on a multiple-choice test? Similarly, the strategy less is more can be utilized when it comes to test-taking on subjects we know very little about.

When taking a test, or being asked to guess about things that we know very little about, we can use Recognition Heuristic to help us. Let your instincts guide you, because often “familiarity” is a cue that can you help you when you don’t know much about the topic.

Hacking Recognition Heuristic when picking baby names

You are so excited to pick out baby names with your significant other. As you brainstorm, you may find yourself subconsciously gravitating toward names of celebrities, famous people, friends, or even pets (yikes!). Unless you want to honor your childhood friend’s pup, you’ll want to hack Recognition Heuristic.

The fact is you may not even know why you liked the name so much until it hits you when the little guy is crawling around and it is a done deal. You can avoid this unfortunate situation by using a few simple strategies for picking unique names:

  • Use a baby name book that focuses on original and deep-meaning names.
  • Once you find a name you like, cross-check it against your Facebook friends for overlap with their children/pets.
  • Select a few names well in advance, and give yourself the final months to make sure you don’t make any odd/unwanted connections.

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