Person-Positivity Heuristic Definition The person-positivity heuristic is a tendency to evaluate individual people more positively than the groups to which they belong. Psychologist David Sears coined the phrase in 1983 because he noticed that results of political polls typically show that although respondents hold political institutions such as the U.S. Congress in low regard, they
Heuristic Processing Definition Heuristic processing refers to le’s attitudes when their motivation to think about something is low (e.g., when they do not care very much about the outcome of an election) and when their ability to think carefully is constrained (e.g., when they are stressed out or pressed for time). It is a relatively
Availability Heuristic Definition The availability heuristic describes a mental strategy in which people judge probability, frequency, or extremity based on the ease with which and the amount of information that can be brought to mind. For example, people may judge easily imaginable risks such as terrorist attacks or airplane crashes as more likely than the
Representativeness Heuristic Definition According to some social psychologists, human beings have the tendency to be cognitive misers—that is, to limit their use of mental resources when they need to make a quick decision or when the issue about which they must make a decision is unimportant to them. People have several strategies they can use
Simulation Heuristic Definition The simulation heuristic focuses on what occurs after a person has experienced an event in his or her life. According to the simulation heuristic, a person imagines possible simulations or alternative outcomes to events that he or she encounters. The imagined alternatives, in turn, affect how a person feels about the event
Affect Heuristic Definition A judgment is said to be based on a heuristic when a person assesses a specified target attribute (e.g., the risk of an approaching stranger in the street) by substituting a related attribute that comes quickly to mind (e.g., intuitive feelings of fear or anxiety) for a more complex analysis (e.g., detailed