The Heuristics Debate

331 Pages·2011·2.116 MB·English

by  Mark Kelman

The Heuristics Debate
Mark Kelman
ABSTRACT
Researchers associated with the “Heuristics and Biases” (H&B) school and those who view heuristics
as “Fast and Frugal” (F&F) problem-solving methods share much in common. They agree that people
frequently and quite reasonably use heuristics, making factual judgments or reaching decisions about
what actions best serve their ends without making use of all potentially relevant information or
computational abilities. This book focuses, though, on the distinctions between the two schools.
Echoing the conventional rational choice model, H&B researchers suggest that people make decisions
by assessing the probability that certain outcomes will follow a particular action and by evaluating
each of these possible outcomes. Unlike rational choice theorists, these researchers emphasize that
people, facing a range of cognitive limitations, will not always make accurate judgments even if they
have perfect information and explain, as well, why evaluations are sensitive to the ways in which
preferences are elicited. F&F scholars claim instead that the key source of the use of heuristics is not
our computational incapacity but our evolved capacity to make use of appropriate environmentally
available cues. People’s judgments are typically ecologically, if not logically, rational in the sense that
our judgments meet our actual goals, if not the demands of classical rational choice theory. Moreover,
while rational choice theorists extol judgment and decision making processes in which decision
makers weigh multiple cues and factors, and H&B theorists believe our incapacity to perform such
multifactor balancing poses problems, F&F theorists believe, descriptively, that we typically use lexical
decision making processes and, normatively, that doing so typically leads us to make better
judgments. These disputes have bite. Policymakers will have very different ideas about what we must
do to induce greater law compliance or insure that consumers can make decisions in their interests,
and they will evaluate the propriety of cost-benefit analysis or the virtues of a rule-bound legal system
differently depending on how they resolve these very basic questions about the flaws, virtues, and
nature of heuristic reasoning.
Keywords: heuristics, heuristics and biases, fast and frugal heuristics, judgment and decision making,
risk perception, preference elicitation, rational choice, Kahneman and Tversky, Gigerenzer
BIBLIOGRAPHIC INFORMATION
Print publication date: 2011 Print ISBN-13: 9780199755608
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199755608.001.0001
Part One Introduction and Overview
1 The Framework
Part Two The Controversy over the Nature of Heuristics
2 The Heuristics and Biases School
3 The Fast and Frugal Heuristics School
4 Fast and Frugal School Objections to the Heuristics and Biases Program
5 Objections to the Fast and Frugal School Program*
Part Three Implications for Law
6 Criminal Punishment and Cognition
7 Regulating Markets
8 Cognition and Value Incommensurability
9 Classical Orthodoxy and Legal Realist Responses Through the Lens of the
Heuristics Debate
Part Four Final Thoughts
10 Conclusion
Index
Acknowledgements
University Press Scholarship Online
Oxford Scholarship Online
The Heuristics Debate
Mark Kelman
Print publication date: 2011
Print ISBN-13: 9780199755608
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2011
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199755608.001.0001
(p.ix) Acknowledgements
I have been working on this project for a very long time; in some ways, it seems fair to
say that I started my professional career investigating the virtues and limits of rational
choice theory back as a third year law student. And I still owe a great debt of gratitude to
the people who worked with me on this broad project back when I was a student, and in
my earliest days teaching here at Stanford, most especially Duncan Kennedy, Mort
Horwitz, Paul Brest, and Tom Heller.
I started working, in a more focused way, on this book in particular a few years back and
have received a great deal of help on this venture from a number of people, none of
whom deserves any of the blame for all of the remaining misunderstandings and errors.
Among the people who stand out in the psychology community who have been especially
generous and helpful in stimulating thoughts about distinct aspects of this work over the
years are Jared Curhan, Barbara Frederickson, Daniel Kahneman, Brian Knutson, Rob
MacCoun, Lee Ross, and Norbert Schwarz (as well as several anonymous referees).
Anthony Wagner stands out especially for giving both me and Nick Kelman (the co-author
of the fifth chapter) a tremendous amount of guidance in working through the material on
memory that is especially important to the discussion in chapter five. (Though, once again,
I need to emphasize that problems and mistakes are ours, not his.) Many colleagues in
the legal academy have given great feedback too, both in collective settings (at Berkeley,
Page 1 of 2
Acknowledgements
UCLA, Stanford, NYU, and Columbia) and one-on-one. I am particularly grateful to Paul
Brest, Dick Craswell, Ronald Dworkin, Rich Ford, Barbara Fried, Mark Greenberg, Tom
Grey, Deborah Hensler, Dan Ho, Russell Korobkin, Christopher Kutz, David Mills,
Thomas Nagel, Jeff Strnad, Seana Shiffrin, Bill Simon, Susan Sturm, and Tim Wu. Many
students and research staff here at Stanford have been helpful too, over the course of
the project: most obviously, Nick Kelman (who co-authored one chapter and did
research for others), Jason Hegland and Juan Carlos Sanchez (who each helped analyze
experimental data), but also RAs Ashley Steinberg, Aaron Nissen, Kelly Lowenberg, and
Elena Coyle. Jake Kelman, Abby Williams, and Katie Turner all helped in experiment
administration. Stanford University in general and the Law School in particular has been a
great place to work, especially on an interdisciplinary project like this one: Larry Kramer
deserves a good deal of the credit for that (and many other things). (p.x)
Page 2 of 2
The Framework
University Press Scholarship Online
Oxford Scholarship Online
The Heuristics Debate
Mark Kelman
Print publication date: 2011
Print ISBN-13: 9780199755608
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2011
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199755608.001.0001
The Framework
Mark Kelman (Contributor Webpage)
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199755608.003.0001
Abstract and Keywords
Researchers in both the “heuristics and biases” school and the school that extols the use
of “fast and frugal” heuristics not only share similar methods but agree that people
frequently make perfectly satisfactory judgments using limited information and limited
computational abilities. However, those in the H&B school emphasize the degree to which
the use of heuristics often prevents us from choosing options that would maximize
expected value in the way that conventional rational choice theorists believe we do. Those
who think of heuristics as “fast and frugal” techniques to make decisions that achieve an
organism’s ends in a given environment are considerably less interested in “biases” than
in achievements. Moreover, scholars in the two schools think differently about why using
heuristics sometimes leads to mistakes; about the nature of rationality; about how
heuristics emerge and operate; and about whether people are less prone to use
heuristics when they have certain background traits or have more time or cognitive
resources to reach a decision.
Page 1 of 19
The Framework
Keywords: heuristics, heuristics and biases, fast and frugal heuristics, judgment and decision making,
evolutionary psychology, rational choice, ecological rationality, lexical decision making, Kahneman and
Tversky, Gigerenzer
A. What heuristics researchers have in common and how they differ
At some high level of generality, there is considerable overlap in the way pretty much
everyone interested in heuristics thinks about heuristics. At some level of generality,
there is widespread agreement that people are employing heuristics whenever they
make a judgment or reach a decision without making use of some information that could
be relevant or some computational abilities that at least some people possess.
Again, there is agreement as well that using strategies that are plainly not formal
optimization strategies is, sometimes, absolutely necessary. Many of us can “know”
enough about the flight of a fly ball in baseball to catch a ball hit quite far from us even
though there is lots of information about where a batted ball will land that we would
never use at all (e.g., information about wind, spin, the force with which the ball was hit)
and computations that many who catch fly balls either do not have the faintest idea how to
perform or could not possibly perform nearly quickly enough to make use of them while
pursuing a fly ball (e.g., about how far a ball will go if there is a particular angle of ascent).
The one-input “gaze heuristic” we apparently use to “solve” the problem appears to
work just fine. According to those who believe that we employ this heuristic, someone
seeking to catch a fly ball first crudely estimates whether the ball will land in front of or
behind him, then runs in that direction, fixing his eye on the ball. He adjusts his running
speed so that the angle of gaze—the angle between the eye and the ball—remains
constant or within a small range.1
At a high level of generality, too, everyone agrees that heuristics are often “functional.”
Using them produces answers that meet our ends well, however these ends are (p.4)
defined. Everyone agrees as well that they may also be used in situations in which their
use is dysfunctional (again, given at least temporary consensus on the definition of
dysfunctionality), though the two groups of researchers I focus on in this book do not
agree on whether subjects are frequently or only rarely harmed by using heuristics.
Moreover, there is widespread agreement that in a multiple-actor setting in which one
agent may not treat another’s interests as if they were her own, the fact that we employ
heuristics can be exploited. Those who would exploit others have the capacity to
manipulate an environment so it has, or appears to have, traits that trigger a particular
judgment or decision, inducing behavior that the manipulator desires rather than the
behavior that the agent would engage in if he either used a wider range of informational
cues or encountered the single or simple cues that he would have encountered absent
the manipulation. Thus, everyone who writes about heuristics worries, at least to some
extent, about both advertisers and sneaky lawyers.2
At this same high level of generality, all agree that it is often easier or preferable to
change the environment in which decision makers function or to delegate decisions from a
badly positioned to a well-positioned decision maker than to try to change how each
individual processes fixed cues: In that sense, there is consensus that the disposition to
Page 2 of 19
The Framework
use even misguided heuristics may be recalcitrant, at least at times. If, for instance,
patients are more likely to figure out how likely it is that they are actually HIV-positive
given that they have tested positive when information is presented in one form rather
than another,3 it might be better to present it in the fashion that most people typically
understand rather than to attempt to train them to “think better,” remind them to focus
more, or even give negative or positive incentives to do a better job.
Moreover, all of those who investigate the use of heuristics do so from a fundamentally
similar methodological starting point, grounded in earlier work studying memory and
perception done by psychologists trained in “mathematical psychology.” Those studying
memory assumed that accurate memory was a dependent variable and studied the
conditions in which accuracy increased or decreased as a way to understand and model
basic memory processes. Similarly, those who studied visual perception looked to see
what parameters of an object produce a particular visual illusion or permit an object to
be seen, and used these observations to create mathematical models of the visual
perceptual system. All researchers who study the use of heuristics in making judgments
and decisions use a fundamentally similar method, a method first employed by
researchers in what is commonly labeled the “heuristics and biases” (H&B) school most
associated with the Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman and with Amos Tversky.4 They treat
accuracy in judgment as the dependent variable and manipulate the choice-making
environment to see what inputs produce both erroneous and true judgments. Doing this
permits them to understand judgment and decision making more generally.5
(p.5) The vast bulk of the literature in both law and the policy sciences relating to
heuristics has drawn on the H&B school. My dominant aim in this book, though, is not by
any means to add much to an already-voluminous literature that explores how that
literature is relevant to policy formation, although I offer a brief conceptual overview of
the contribution of the heuristics and biases literature to law and policy analysis at the
end of Chapter Two and more detailed analyses of the contribution of the literature to
policy formation, focusing predominantly on crime control in Chapter Six and regulating
product safety and discrimination in Chapter Seven. Instead, I focus on an issue that has
been almost entirely ignored in the legal academy and policy community: the debate
between proponents of the heuristics and biases school and those associated with the
“fast and frugal” (F&F) heuristics school, most closely linked with Professor Gerd
Gigerenzer.6
Those in the H&B school emphasize the degree to which the use of heuristics often
prevents us from choosing options that would maximize expected value in the way that
conventional rational choice theorists believe we do, because we both miscompute
probabilities that our choices will have certain consequences and misevaluate each of the
end states that might arise. Those who think of heuristics as “fast and frugal” techniques
to make decisions that achieve an organism’s ends in a given environment, whether or
not the problem-solving techniques are formally rational, are considerably less interested
in “biases” or errors than in achievements. As I note later in this chapter, the most salient
single contrast that the relatively small group of lawyers and policymakers who are aware
Page 3 of 19
The Framework
at all of this debate have typically drawn between the schools is that those associated with
the H&B school are more prone to believe that actors should be protected from making
errors (as consumers, as voters) or cede decision-making authority to “experts” who
might be less prone to make these same errors while those associated with the F&F
school share rational choice theorists’ optimism that subjects have adopted strategies
that work well for them, even though they decidedly reject rational choice theorists’
descriptive accounts of how it is that subjects are able to make good decisions.
In this view, the most significant contribution of the H&B school has been to detail a novel
sort of market failure. While conventional rational choice theorists might see market
failure in situations in which those making choices had inadequate information about the
features of the options they were choosing among, H&B-influenced policymakers focused
not on the external impediments to good choice (lack of information about the options) but
the internal incapacity of subjects properly to use even the information that they have.
F&F theorists, in this view, supported the rational choice scholars’ intuition that people
had good mechanisms to make good choices, even though the mechanisms they identified
had little in common with those rat-choice theorists had identified. There is a great deal to
be learned by drawing this (p.6) contrast, but I believe I demonstrate over the course
of the book that it is significantly incomplete and partly misleading as well.
As I explore in far greater detail later in the book, the distinctions between the schools do
not merely go to the question of whether heuristics can better be seen as a frequent
source of error or as the basic building block of intelligence and functional decision
making. Scholars in the two schools think differently about why heuristics lead to mistakes
when they do lead to mistakes, think differently about what it means to behave rationally,
think differently about how the use of particular heuristics emerges, think differently
about the processes by which we reach judgments when reasoning heuristically, and
think differently about whether people are less prone to use heuristics when they have
certain background traits (intelligence, disposition) or have more time or cognitive
resources to reach a decision.
Take, just as an example, the issue of how to account for error. H&B theorists are likely
to model the problematic use of heuristics in the following way: Using heuristics
generates accurate judgments or good decisions in most circumstances, but not all.
Actors might correctly believe a particular conclusion typically follows from some
perceived reaction to stimuli, something that could loosely be described as serving the
same role as an inferential “premise.” The premises they rely upon are the most readily
processed sub-set of a more complete set of input-premises, the cues that can be
manipulated quickly and under high cognitive load that “substitute” for a fuller
consideration of multiple factors. What gives rise to error is that the correct conclusion
doesn’t always follow from the most readily processed cues and reactions. The additional,
harder-to-process factors and reactions—those that can generally be ignored with little
cost to accurate decision making—may sometimes turn out to be crucial.
In that sense, H&B theorists are making arguments about error that are conceptually
parallel to those typically made by lawyers critiquing the use of rules, proxies, or
Page 4 of 19
The Framework
conclusive presumptions in decision making. Even those generalizations that are right on
most occasions are not invariably right. Rules are inevitably over- and under-inclusive.
Think of the canonical case of using a rule rather than a standard: ages of majority that
determine when someone can vote, or buy liquor, or consent to sexual relations. In a
sense, the use of a rule (those over 18 can vote) is very much like the use of an H&B
heuristic: we substitute an easily made judgment—is the person trying to register to
vote older of younger than 18?—for a richer, harder-to-determine true target attribute
—is the would-be voter mature, reflective, politically sophisticated, and likely to care
about the resolution of political issues? Naturally, some who are older than 18 are not
very mature and some who are younger are quite mature.
The failure to make use of fuller, more sensitive judgment techniques may, but need not,
generate significant net costs. Error costs might well at least sometimes outweigh the
costs of using more tailored, effortful inference processes, but of course, this (p.7)
need not be true. Judgments made on the basis of just a few cues could be completely
accurate or the gains that would accrue from making more accurate judgments might be
outweighed by the costs of increasing accuracy.
I return to the discussion of how H&B theorists conceptualize error in discussing the
“availability heuristic” in Chapter Two, but I preview the argument here because it
provides such an easy and cogent illustration. It might well be true, most often, that if a
certain sort of event X is “available”—that is, we can readily recall instances of X
occurring rather than Y—then X is in fact the more common occurrence. Thus, we move,
however unconsciously, from the readily processed judgment-making input—it is easier
to recall instances of X than Y—to the conclusion that X is more common. Drawing this
conclusion is generally sound because we typically recall things we have been exposed to
frequently and we generally are exposed more often to things that actually occur more
often. But it won’t always be the case that the things we recall most readily are in fact
more commonplace. We may recall things easily for other reasons (e.g., their emotional
salience), and then misapprehend the relative frequency of X and Y, wrongly concluding
that X happens more than Y because we easily recollect instances of X.
In a second view, more associated with evolutionary psychology generally, and the F&F
school that is so heavily influenced by evolutionary psychology, we would model the
problem of mistake quite differently. Traits—including the disposition to use particular
cognitive methods, such as heuristics—that were adaptive in the particular settings in
which they evolved (the “environment of evolutionary adaptation,” or EEA) may
sometimes have become dysfunctional in some modern settings. Evolution works slowly;
there is adaptive lag. Think about the canonical illustration from evolutionary psychology:
our taste for high-calorie sweets and fats—the taste is a decision-guiding “trait” that was
perhaps functional in the calorie-poor environment in which our ancestors lived—may
now serve even our gene-replicating ends poorly. This will be true if overeating and
heart attacks have become a bigger threat to survival, or at least our capacity to insure
we are around to protect our young until they reach maturity, than starvation. What is
critical, though, is how we perceive and judge “error.” In judging whether a heuristic has
Page 5 of 19