cognitive bias and heuristics — 1 thorough investigation

a thorough investigation into cognitive bias and the related heuristics would, ideally, manage to separate the two cleanly into different boxes. mine cannot, on any given day. they arrive together, leave together, and finish each other’s sentences in the bar with mike. mike, predictably, does not notice them at all.

so here i am at the desk on a thursday at 7:42am, with carla upstairs at the annual planning meeting and the rest of the morning more or less mine. the building has gone quiet in the way that suggests everyone important is in a room i am not invited to.

i opened a tab to write this. then six more tabs to research it. then i forgot why i opened the first one. that, already, is part of the topic.

1. cognitive bias and heuristics, brief

let me put it in the language of a man at a bar who has been told twice already to stop. cognitive bias and heuristics are a married couple. one is practical and gets things done. the other is convinced and cannot be reasoned with. they share a kitchen and a microwave and they rarely agree on the order of operations.

the heuristic says: choose the cereal you bought last time, you do not have time for cereal philosophy. the bias says: that cereal is the best cereal because you bought it, and anyone who buys a different cereal is suspicious. the heuristic saves you eight minutes; the bias spends those eight minutes judging strangers in the same aisle.

for the deeper version of how the convinced half operates, i’ll point you at an earlier piece on how confirmation bias works when you are always right by accident, which is the parent topic and the one i refer back to whenever i catch myself doing exactly that.

etymology, briefly: heuristic traces back to the greek root meaning “to find” — the same root as eureka, per a website that knows things about words. mine mostly find more tabs.

2. sarah explained heuristics with a glance

sarah came over once, last spring, ostensibly to drop off a book. she stood at my front door for ninety seconds, scanned the kitchen counter, the couch, the open laptop with its 47 tabs, and said one sentence: “you make every decision twice and neither of them counts.”

that was a heuristic. sarah did not read each tab. sarah did not audit the counter. sarah looked, and her brain produced a verdict in under two seconds, and the verdict was correct. this is what economists call a fast-and-frugal rule and what the rest of us call sarah being annoying about it.

sarah understands her pension. sarah runs marathons. sarah’s brain has a folder for “decisions worth making twice” and another for “decisions already made, stop re-touching them.” mine has one folder labeled everything and a sticky note that says later.

the relevant cognitive bias and heuristics interaction here is the sarah glance bias: i now make decisions slightly faster when i imagine sarah is about to walk in. the heuristic works. the bias is that i then defend the decision as if i made it on purpose.

3. tom uses heuristics in the volvo

tom, who went from uni straight into a house and a wife and two kids and a station wagon, uses heuristics like a person who has read one book about chess uses openings. he commits early. he commits hard. he does not revisit. tom’s volvo has a preferred lane and tom has been in that lane for six years.

tom’s heuristic for dinner: whatever the wife suggests, agree, then propose pasta as a counter. tom’s heuristic for taxes: pay them. tom’s heuristic for pension: have one. these are good heuristics. they keep a man’s life in the lane he chose. they are also, and nobody says this out loud, what cognitive bias looks like when it is dressed up in a sweater and going to brunch.

tom is not stupid. tom has optimized. but tom’s brain has stopped asking new questions, and that is a heuristic one bad week away from being a bias. for a documentary record, watch the early seasons of the show about the radio psychiatrist who lives with his father — frasier crane is a cathedral built entirely out of heuristics that stopped being useful in episode three.

4. the wall of insults audit is a heuristic

i keep a digital wall of insults — comments, dms, the occasional certified email — and i audit it on slow afternoons. last quarter the wall told me, by sheer volume, that i write too long, talk about my mother too rarely, and use the word microwave with a frequency one anonymous reader called “weaponized.”

the heuristic the wall produces is fast: scan, count, ignore the worst, screenshot the best. the bias is slower: i am now mildly more likely to write about my mother next, not because i want to, but because the audit said so, and the audit feels like data, and data feels like permission.

DATA IS NOT PERMISSION. DATA IS A SUGGESTION WITH A BETTER OUTFIT.

this is the trap. the wall of insults is a heuristic dressed as research. i treat it as research. those decisions then look reasoned. they are not. they are reactive. that is a textbook example of what types of cognitive bias and examples look like when they hide inside a method that feels rigorous.

5. the seventh microwave is also a heuristic

this is the seventh microwave i have owned. i bought it from the same place as the previous six. no reviews. i typed “microwave,” scrolled forty-eight seconds, and clicked the one with a number i recognized. that is the recognition heuristic, per the literature i’m fairly sure exists.

the bias attached is that i now believe this brand is good, despite the kitchen counter evidence screaming the opposite. seven units. one brand. zero pattern recognition. the heuristic recognized the brand. the bias recognized that recognizing was easier than reflecting.

the third yoga mat is the same story in a different aisle. i bought it because the algorithm showed me an ad in a color i’d liked elsewhere. the heuristic: this color, again. the bias: i am the kind of person who does yoga. neither is true.

this loops back to the topic, because the larger investigation into being an idiot on purpose covers exactly this — the idiot in the aisle is the same idiot at the desk, just running a different heuristic. the word idiot, here, is not an insult. it is a job title.

6. verdict, the heuristic is the bias on a budget

the verdict, after a morning of looking, is that i cannot separate cognitive bias and heuristics into clean boxes because they share a flat in my head and both are on the lease. the heuristic does the dishes. the bias decides what counts as clean. one is useful. one is convinced. they take turns answering the door.

a list of cognitive biases and heuristics, if you wanted one, would not be a list — it would be a venn diagram with one giant overlap and two tiny crescents on the outside, where you actually noticed yourself thinking. critical thinking and cognitive bias live in those crescents. confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance live in the overlap, throwing a small party.

i have not, by any objective measure, become wiser this morning. i have used the word heuristic often enough that the spellcheck stopped flagging it, which is its own kind of progress, and arguably the only kind available before lunch.

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