What Is A Heuristic?

 In another of my occasional posts on consumer behavior and , sicne I have used the term before, I wanted to look at what a heuristic is. I have said that it is a decision rule our brain uses to help make decisions more quickly and easily and it has the following characteristics:

1. Only some information is considered when making the decision

2. Some information that might be useful in making the decision is ignored

For example, one possible heuristic would be "I enjoy worker placement games more than other games." If I hear that a new worker placement game has arrived at my FLGS, I am going to want to take a look at it while I would pay little to no attention if I heard that a new dice game had arrived. However, if I heard a new dice rolling worker placement game arrived, I would want to take a look at it.

Using heuristics allows us to make decisions in a number of areas without too much effort, at the cost of overlooking items that might interest us, since generally we only use them in low involvement decisions.