Social heuristics

Social heuristics as a tool of bounded rationality are thought to guide behavior and decisions in the social environment. Social environments tend to be characterised by complexity and uncertainty, and agents with limited informational or cognitive resources may rely on simple rules of thumb to make decisions. 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 the prisoner's dilemma, based on the argument that cooperation is typically advantageous in daily life, and therefore people develop a cooperation heuristic that gets applied even to one-shot anonymous interactions (the so-called "social heuristics hypothesis" of human cooperation). Within social psychology, some researchers have viewed heuristics as closely linked to cognitive biases. Others have argued that these biases result from the application of social heuristics depending on the structure of the environment that they operate in. Researchers in the latter approach treat the study of social heuristics as closely linked to social rationality, a field of research that applies the ideas of bounded rationality and heuristics to the realm of social environments. According to them, social heuristics include those that may use social information, operate in social contexts, or both. For instance, the follow-the-majority heuristic uses social information as inputs but is not necessarily applied in a social context, while the equity-heuristic uses non-social information but in a social context such as the allocation of parental resources amongst offspring. Such heuristics may be used by humans and other animals, but may also be potentially applied to artificial intelligent systems.

Contents

• Examples
• Automatic vs unconscious
• References