Social heuristics
Social heuristics are simple decision making strategies that guide people's behavior and decisions in the social environment when time, information, or cognitive resources are scarce. Social environments tend to be characterised by complexity and uncertainty, and in order to simplify the decision-making process, people may use heuristics, which are decision making strategies that involve ignoring some information or relying on simple rules of thumb. The class of phenomena described by social heuristics overlap with those typically investigated by social psychology and game theory. At the intersection of these fields, social heuristics have been applied to explain cooperation in economic games used in experimental research. In the view of the field's academics, cooperation is typically advantageous in daily life, and therefore people develop a cooperation heuristic that gets applied even to one-shot anonymous interactions (the "social heuristics hypothesis" of human cooperation). Overview Bounded rationality In the decision-making process, optimisation is almost always intractable in any implementation, whether machine or neural. Because of this, defined parameters or boundaries must be implemented in the process in order to achieve an acceptable outcome. This method is known as applying bounded rationality, where an individual makes a collective and rational choice that considers “the limits of human capability to calculate, the severe deficiencies of human knowledge about the consequences of choice, and the limits of human ability to adjudicate among multiple goals”. They are essentially incorporating a series of criteria, referred to as alternatives for choice. These alternatives are often not initially given to the decision maker, so a theory of search is also incorporated. Heuristics Heuristics are a common alternative, which can be defined as simple strategies for decision making where the actor only pays attention to key pieces of information, allowing the decision to be made quickly and with less cognitive effort. Daniel Kahneman and Shane Frederick have advanced the view that heuristics are decision-making processes that employ attribute substitution, where the decision maker substitutes the "target attribute" of the thing he is trying to judge with a "heuristic attribute" that more easily comes to mind. Shah and Daniel M. Oppenheimer have framed heuristics in terms of effort reduction, where the decision maker makes use of techniques that make decisions less effortful, such as only paying attention to some cues or only considering a subset of the available alternatives. Another view of heuristics comes from Gerd Gigerenzer and colleagues, who conceptualize heuristics as "fast and frugal" techniques for decision making that simplify complex calculations and make up part of the "adaptive toolbox" of human capacities for reasoning and inference. Under this framework, heuristics are ecologically rational, meaning a heuristic may be successful if the way it works matches the demands of the environment it is being used in. Researchers in this vein also argue that heuristics may be just as or even more accurate when compared to more complex strategies, such as multiple regression. Social heuristics Social heuristics can include heuristics that use social information, operate in social contexts, or both. Examples of