Cognitive Biases and Heuristics

Abstract

Growing in part out of insights about heuristics and biases, the notion that people sometimes make decisions using mental shortcuts that require little mental effort or capacity and sometimes are more consciously thoughtful (Type 1 and Type 2 processing) has dominated much of social psychology for 50 years. While much of the early research in this area was dominated by investigations of errors apparently caused by mental shortcuts, current investigators note that both types of processing can lead to productive decisions as well as errors. The dual processing notion has been challenged by several theories of a single dimension of processing and by criticisms of the assumed clustering of processing features. However, the dual processing paradigm is likely to continue to be influential in a wide variety of studies in social psychology and media psychology.