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.