I argue that an ecologically distributed conception of instrumental rationality can and should be extended to a socially distributed conception of instrumental rationality in social environments. The argument proceeds by showing that the assumption of exogenously fixed units of activity cannot be justified; different units of activity are possible and some are better means to independently given ends than others, in various circumstances. An important social heuristic, the mirror heuristic, enables the flexible formation of units of activity in (...) game theoretic situations, including collective units where these are instrumentally effective. In effect, the mirror heuristic makes the formation of units of activity endogenous to instrumental rationality. Moreover, the mirror heuristic is a conditional metaheuristic, which depends on mind reading of the heuristics of other players rather than on predictions of their behavior. Such mind reading can be regarded as emerging from an arms race between behavioral mimicry and ever smarter behavior reading. Even though unilateral mind reading may have benefits, the mirror metaheuristic illustrates that mutual mind reading has distinctive functions in responding to the challenges of social complexity. If simple heuristics can make us smart in the right environments, then social heuristics can make us smarter still. (shrink)

This title invites readers to discover the simple heuristics that people use to navigate the complexities and surprises of environments populated with others.

(1995). Heuristics, hypotheses, and social influence: A new approach to the experimental simulation of social epistemology. Social Epistemology: Vol. 9, Simulating Science, pp. 57-69.

Transitive inference (TI) refers to social cognition that facilitates the discernment of unknown relationships between individuals using known relationships. It is extensively reported that TI evolves in animals living in a large group because TI could assess relative rank without deducing all dyadic relationships, which averts costly fights. The relationships in a large group become so complex that social cognition may not be developed adequately to handle such complexity. If members apply TI to all possible members in the (...) group, TI requires extremely highly developed cognitive abilities especially in a large group. Instead of developing cognitive abilities significantly, animals may apply simplified TI we call reference TI in this study as heuristic approaches. The reference TI allows members to recognize and remember social interactions only among a set of reference members rather than all potential members. Our study assumes that information processes in the reference TI comprises (1) the number of reference members based on which individuals infer transitively, (2) the number of reference members shared by the same strategists, and (3) memory capacity. We examined how information processes evolve in a large group using evolutionary simulations in the hawk–dove game. Information processes with almost any numbers of reference members could evolve in a large group as long as the numbers of shared reference member are high because information from the others’ experiences is shared. TI dominates immediate inference, which assesses relative rank on direct interactions, because TI could establish social hierarchy more rapidly applying information from others’ experiences. (shrink)

The findings of our experiments showed that social network sites such as Google Plus, Facebook, and Twitter, have the ability to acquire knowledge about their users’ movements not only within SNSs but also beyond SNS boundaries, particularly among websites that embedded SNS widgets such as Google’s Plus One button, Facebook’s Like button, and Twitter’s Tweet button. In this paper, we analysed the privacy implication of such a practice from a moral perspective by applying Helen Nissenbaum’s decision heuristic derived from (...) her contextual integrity framework in order to answer the question of whether or not an online user’s privacy is being violated by this practice. (shrink)

The findings of our experiments showed that social network sites such as Google Plus, Facebook, and Twitter, have the ability to acquire knowledge about their users’ movements not only within SNSs but also beyond SNS boundaries, particularly among websites that embedded SNS widgets such as Google’s Plus One button, Facebook’s Like button, and Twitter’s Tweet button. In this paper, we analysed the privacy implication of such a practice from a moral perspective by applying Helen Nissenbaum’s decision heuristic derived from (...) her contextual integrity framework in order to answer the question of whether or not an online user’s privacy is being violated by this practice. (shrink)

In the present study it was shown that both decision heuristics and social value orientation play important roles in the building of preferences. This was revealed in decision tasks in which participants were deciding about candidates for a job position. An eye-tracking equipment was applied in order to register participants´ information acquisition. It was revealed that participants performing well on a series of heuristics tasks (availability, representativeness, anchoríng & adjustment,and attribution) including a confidence judgment also behaved more (...) accurately than low performers in the fulfillment of the preference tasks. It was also established that the high performers were not as influenced by whether uncertainty was presented in terms of probabilities or in terms of frequencies as was the low performers. With regard to social value orientation the results revealed that decision processing differences were more systematic between cooperators and competitors than between cooperators and individualists. Also, the cooperators did not seem to attend more to proenvironmental goals than to profit goals in the evaluation of the candidates. Finally, it was shown that accountable cooperators invested more time in their decisions than those that were not accountable, and that no such difference was observed between accountable and not accountable competitors or individualists. (shrink)

Germany is considered to be a pioneer of social security systems; nonetheless, globalization and demographic changes have put enormous pressure on them. A solution is not yet in sight as the debate on the future of the German social security systems still lacks consensus. We argue that ideas matter and that the debate can benefit from a deeper reflection on the concept of social security. This objective is pursued along two lines. First, we take a historical perspective (...) and reconstruct the development of Germany's social security systems. Second, we scrutinize from a theoretical perspective how social security is conceptualized in public and theoretical debates. Behind the various positions, we identify four basic ideal types. We then analyze how these ideal types account for the benefits of social security systems and what role they assign to corporations in providing social security. While two ultimately reinforce potential conflicts between different groups in society, the other two ideal types reveal possible benefits for all. The last ideal type actually conceptualizes social security systems as insurance that fosters risky but overall productive investments in human and other forms of capital. Therefore, it can be shown that social security systems are not necessarily threatened by globalization and that incentives exist for corporations to invest in the provision of social security. (shrink)

Even when they are defined with precision, one can often read and hear judgments about the vagueness of heuristics in debates about heuristic reasoning. This opinion is not just frequent but also quite reasonable. In fact, during the 1990s, there was a certain controversy concerning this topic that confronted two of the leading groups in the field of heuristic reasoning research, each of whom held very different perspectives. In the present text, we will focus on two of the papers (...) published in Psychological Review, wherein the arguments of each of these groups were presented:. (shrink)

The mechanism-realist paradigm in the philosophy of science, championed by Mario Bunge and Roy Bhaskar, sets certain expectations for the substantive social-scientific application of the paradigm. To evaluate the application of the paradigm in accomplished substantive research, as well as the potential for future research, I examine the work of Charles Tilly, the exemplary substantive work in the mechanism-realist tradition. Based on this examination, I argue for the usefulness of explanatory mechanisms, provided that they are couched in terms of (...) a heuristic. Such a position is the most reasonable one to adopt given the expectations set by the paradigm in relation to complexity stemming from mechanism interaction and to a notion of causality that is deeper than that acknowledged by empiricism and positivism. (shrink)

We argue that the interaction of biased media coverage and widespread employment of the recognition heuristic can produce epistemic injustices. First, we explain the recognition heuristic as studied by Gerd Gigerenzer and colleagues, highlighting how some of its components are largely external to, and outside the control of, the cognitive agent. We then connect the recognition heuristic with recent work on the hypotheses of embedded, extended, and scaffolded cognition, arguing that the recognition heuristic is best understood as an instance of (...) scaffolded cognition. In section three, we consider the double-edged sword of cognitive scaffolding. On the one hand, scaffolds can reduce the internal processing demands on cognitive agents while increasing their access to information. On the other hand, the use of scaffolding leaves cognitive agents increasingly vulnerable to forming false beliefs or failing to form beliefs at all about particular topics. With respect to the recognition heuristic, agents rely on third parties (such as the media) to report not just what’s true but also what’s important or valuable. This makes cognitive agents relying on these third parties vulnerable to two erroneous influences: 1) because they don’t recognize something, it isn’t important or valuable, and 2) because they do recognize something, it is important or valuable. Call the latter the Kardashian Inference and the former the Darfur Inference. In section four, we use Fricker’s (2007) concept of epistemic injustice to characterize the nature and harm of these false inferences, with special emphasis on the Darfur Inference. In section five, we use data-mining and an empirical study to show how Gigerenzer’s population estimation task is liable to produce Darfur Inferences. We conclude with some speculative remarks on more important Darfur Inferences, and how to avoid them by scaffolding better. One primary way to accomplish this it to shift the burden of embodying the virtue of epistemic justice from the hearer or consumer of media to the media themselves. (shrink)

BackgroundThe Chinese government implemented a lockdown to contain the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic during the Chinese Lunar New Year when people have the tradition to visit families and friends. Previous research suggested that heuristic processing increased risky behavioral willingness and that people’s tendency to use heuristic processing varied across different adulthood stages. This study thus investigated the relationships among age, heuristic processing of COVID-19-related information, and the willingness to have social gatherings during the lockdown.MethodsA sample of 1,651 participants was (...) recruited from an online crowdsourcing platform between January 31 and February 04 in 2020, with a mean age of 30.69, 47.9% being women. Participants completed an online questionnaire about heuristic processing of COVID-19-related information, willingness to engage in social gatherings during the lockdown, age, and other demographic information.ResultsAge was found to have a U-shaped curvilinear relationship with heuristic processing, and heuristic processing was positively correlated with the willingness to have social gatherings. Further analyses showed that heuristic processing curvilinearly mediated the relationship between age and the willingness to have social gatherings.ConclusionCompared with young adults, emerging and older adults are more likely to engage in heuristic processing, which in turn, increases the willingness to have social gatherings. Heuristic processing serves as an underlying mechanism to explain the relationship between age and risky behavioral willingness. (shrink)

We propose that human reasoning relies on an inherence heuristic, an implicit cognitive process that leads people to explain observed patterns (e.g., girls wear pink) in terms of the inherent features of their constituents (e.g., pink is an inherently feminine color). We then demonstrate how this proposed heuristic can provide a unified account for a broad set of findings spanning areas of research that might at first appear unrelated (e.g., system justification, nominal realism, is–ought errors in moral reasoning). By revealing (...) the deep commonalities among the diverse phenomena that fall under its scope, our account is able to generate new insights into these phenomena, as well as new empirical predictions. A second main goal of this paper, aside from introducing the inherence heuristic, is to articulate the proposal that the heuristic serves as a foundation for the development of psychological essentialism. More specifically, we propose that essentialism—which is the common belief that natural and social categories are underlain by hidden, causally powerful “essences”—emerges over the first few years of life as an elaboration of the earlier, and more open-ended, intuitions supplied by the inherence heuristic. In the final part of the paper, we distinguish our proposal from competing accounts (e.g., Strevens' K-laws) and clarify the relationship between the inherence heuristic and related cognitive tendencies (e.g., the correspondence bias). In sum, this paper illuminates a basic cognitive process that emerges early in life and is likely to have profound effects on many aspects of human psychology. (shrink)

Suppose that disgust can provide evidence of moral wrongdoing. What account of disgust might make sense of this? A recent and promising theory is the social contagion view, proposed by Alexandra Plakias. After criticizing both its descriptive and normative claims, I draw two conclusions. First, we should question the wisdom of drawing so straight a line from biological poisons and pathogens to social counterparts. Second, we don’t need to explain the evidential value of disgust by appealing to what (...) the response tracks. These lessons point toward an alternative: namely, that disgust is a moral heuristic. On the heuristic view, disgust is a trigger for the subconscious use of a particular rule: I show how this view fits with a plausible hypothesis about the social function of disgust, and then apply it to Leon Kass’s famous use of repugnance to criticize cloning. (shrink)

Intelligence on mass media audiences was founded on representative statistical samples, analysed by statisticians at the market departments of media corporations. The techniques for aggregating user data in the age of pervasive and ubiquitous personal media build on large aggregates of information analysed by algorithms that transform data into commodities. While the former technologies were built on socio-economic variables such as age, gender, ethnicity, education, media preferences, Big Data technologies register consumer choice, geographical position, web movement, and behavioural information in (...) technologically complex ways that for most lay people are too abstract to appreciate the full consequences of. The data mined for pattern recognition privileges relational rather than demographic qualities. We argue that the agency of interpretation at the bottom of market decisions within media companies nevertheless introduces a ‘heuristics of the algorithm’, where the data inevitably becomes translated into social categories. In the paper we argue that although the promise of algorithmically generated data is often implemented in automated systems where human agency gets increasingly distanced from the data collected, one can observe a felt need among media users and among industry actors to ‘translate back’ the algorithmically produced relational statistics into ‘traditional’ social parameters. The tenacious social structures within the advertising industries work against the techno-economically driven tendencies within the Big Data economy. (shrink)

I investigate the construction of the mathematical concept of quaternion from a methodological and heuristic viewpoint to examine what we can learn from it for the study of the advancement of mathematical knowledge. I will look, in particular, at the inferential microstructures that shape this construction, that is, the study of both the very first, ampliative inferential steps, and their tentative outcomes—i.e. small ‘structures’ such as provisional entities and relations. I discuss how this paradigmatic case study supports the recent approaches (...) to problem-solving and philosophy of mathematics, and how it suggests refinements of them. In more detail, I argue that the inferential micro-structures enable us to shed more light on the informal, heuristic side of mathematical practice, and its inferential and rational procedures. I show how they enable the generation of a problem, the construction of its conditions of solvability, the search for a hypothesis to solve it, and how these processes are representation-sensitive. On this base, I argue that: 1.the recent development of the philosophy of mathematics was right in moving from Lakatos’ initial investigation of the formal side of a mathematical proof to the investigation of the semi-formal, heuristic side of the mathematical practice as a way of understanding mathematical knowledge and its advancement. 2.The investigation of mathematical practice and discovery can be improved by a finer-grained study of the inferential micro-structures that are built during mathematical problem-solving. (shrink)

Previous research has shown that the more individuals view observable entities as animate, the more those entities are associated with having psychological and physiological experiences. This study examined the relationship between children's animistic and anthropomorphic reasoning for concepts of unobservable scientific (i.e., germ) and religious (i.e., God) entities. This study further explored how children's conceptions vary according to the social learning opportunities (i.e., discourse, rituals) parents reportedly create. Parent–child dyads with young children from diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds participated. (...) Three central findings emerged. First, children readily associated God with psychobiological characteristics but did not do so to the same extent for germs. Second, children applied more psychobiological properties to both entity types when they believed that the entity was animate. Third, engaging in rituals and discourse with parents was indirectly related to children's concepts of God but not related to their concepts of germs. Overall, this study presented support for a connection between children's animistic and anthropomorphic reasoning for unobservable entities, and an indirect effect of cultural input on this reasoning. The implications of these findings will be discussed. (shrink)

The article is a summary of recent experimental data on anchoring heuristic and models that seek to explain it. Anchoring heuristic represents one of the mechanisms of decision making in situations of limited information or time, by using a comparison standard called – an anchor. Given the supposed wide usage of this heuristic, authors explore the unconscious character of the heuristic and ways of making its biasing effects less prominent. Apart from the standard experimental design in which anchor is directly (...) connected to the judgment in question, evidence shows that people can be anchored indirectly, even when the anchor is perceived unconsciously. Newest data show that anchoring effect should be explained by two distinct processes. In the concluding remarks, authors consider broader implications of anchoring for the field of social cognition.U članku se opisuju noviji eksperimentalni nalazi vezani uz heuristiku sidrenja kao i modeli koji ih objašnjavaju. Heuristika sidrenja označava jedan od načina na koji ljudi donose odluke u nedostatku informacija i/ili vremena, a podrazumijeva korištenje standarda usporedbe kako bi se došlo do željene procjene. S obzirom na pretpostavljenu široku upotrebu ove heuristike, u članku se istražuju teoretska objašnjenja, razjašnjavaju razlozi zbog kojih je utjecaj te heuristike nedostupan svijesti te kako umanjiti njome izazvanu pristranost u razmišljanju. Osim standardnog nacrta kojim se ispituje ovaj fenomen opisani su i dokazi prema kojima sidro može vršiti svoj utjecaj i kad se ne dovodi u direktnu vezu s procjenom, čak i kada je percipirano nesvjesnim putem. Najnoviji skup istraživanja pak pokazuje da se heuristika sidrenja, prvotno zamišljena kao jedinstveni mehanizam, zapravo može podijeliti na dva bitno različita procesa. Zaključno se razmatraju kakve bi implikacije ovaj razvoj u istraživanjima mogao imati za područje socijalne kognicije općenito. (shrink)

The simple heuristics that may indeed usually make us smart–or at least smart enough–in contexts of individual choice will sometimes make us dumb, especially in contexts of social choice. Here each individual choice (or vote) has little impact on the overall choice, although the overall choice is compounded out of the individual choices. I use an example (risk aversion) to illustrate the point.

The intersection of ELSI and science forms a complicated nexus yet their integration is an important goal both for society and for the successful advancement of science. In what follows, I present a heuristic that makes boundary identification and crossing an important tool in the discovery of potential areas of ethical, legal, and social concern in science. A dynamic and iterative application of the heuristic can lead towards a fuller integration and appreciation of the concerns of ELSI and of (...) science from both sides of the divide. (shrink)

There is a large literature on social epistemology, some of which is concerned with expert knowledge. Formal representations of the aggregation of decisions, estimates, and the like play a larger role in these discussions. Yet these discussions are neither sufficiently social nor epistemic. The assumptions minimize the role of knowledge, and often assume independence between observers. This paper presents a more naturalistic approach, which appeals to a model of epistemic gain from others, as mutual consilience—a genuinely social (...) notion of epistemology. Using the example of Michael Polanyi’s account of science as an illustration, it introduces the notion of double heuristics: that individuals, each with their own heuristics, each with cognitive biases and limitations, are aggregated by a decision procedure, like voting, and this second order procedure produces its own heuristic, with its own cognitive biases and limitations. An example might be the limited ability of democracies to assimilate expert knowledge. (shrink)

If A confirms H and B confirms H, it seems reasonable to infer that A&B confirms H. However, this inference is not valid; it is only a heuristic. I show that the level of confirmation A and B each give to H by itself implies nothing about the level of confirmation that A&B gives to H. Any combination of values is possible for P(H), P(H|A), P(H|B) and P(H|AB) is possible. Still, I show the heuristic leads from true premises to true (...) conclusions whenever A and B are statistically independent or correlated,which includes most situations where we evaluate evidence. There is risk, though, when one does not consider how A and B interact; one can miss anti-correlations that lead the heuristic to fail. The problem is exacerbated when groups of people are motivated to support a favored hypothesis. Each person finds evidence that confirms the hypothesis and contributes that evidence to the group’s discourse (e.g. through a climate change denial website). The temptation to focus solely on the number of individual pieces of evidence can lead people to ignore whether the evidence fits together. In combination with cognitive biases, this can lead to serious errors. (shrink)

Some of the most relevant problems today both in Science and practical problems involves Coupled Socio-ecological Systems, which are some of the best examples of Complex Systems. In this work we discuss groundwater-management as an example of these Coupled Socio-ecological System, also known as Coupled Human and Natural Systems. We argue that it is possible and even necessary to construct a contextual statistical theory of groundwater management. Contextuality implies some very different statistical features as entanglement and complementarity. We discuss some (...) interpretation about statistical entanglement and statistical complementarity in terms of groundwater flow theory and extraction equation. To this end, we propose a non-Kolmogorobian approach following the Växjö school of thought. One of the most straightforward conclusions is that in this way, a statistical-contextual treatment of groundwater management may not only give place to new flow equations, but it could have a profound impact in resource management. Then the new basic unity of analysis should be the indivisible pair. We should not talk any more about aquifer dynamics or resource management plans by themselves. Physical and social systems are coupled in a statistical-contextual fundamental way, and a socio-hydrogeological theory should be developed. (shrink)

This article proposes a novel integrative approach to moral judgment and a related model that could explain how unconscious heuristic processes are transformed into consciously accessible moral intuitions. Different hypothetical cases have been tested empirically to evoke moral intuitions that support principles from competing moral theories. We define and analyze the types of intuitions that moral theories and studies capture: those focusing on agents (A), deeds (D), and consequences (C). The integrative ADC approach uses the heuristic principle of “attribute substitution” (...) to explain how people make intuitive judgments. The target attributes of moral judgments are moral blameworthiness and praiseworthiness, which are substituted with more accessible and computable information about an agent's virtues and vices, right/wrong deeds, and good/bad consequences. The processes computing this information are unconscious and inaccessible, and therefore explaining how they provide input for moral intuitions is a key problem. We analyze social heuristics identified in the literature and offer an outline for a new model of moral judgment. Simple social heuristics triggered by morally salient cues rely on three distinct processes (role-model entity, action analysis, and consequence tallying—REACT) in order to compute the moral valence of specific intuitive responses (A, D, and C). These are then rapidly combined to form an intuitive judgment that could guide quick decision making. The ADC approach and REACT model can clarify a wide set of data from empirical moral psychology and could inform future studies on moral judgment, as well as case assessments and discussions about issues causing “deadlocked” moral intuitions. (shrink)

This book explores new findings on the long-neglected topic of theory construction and discovery, and challenges the orthodox, current division of scientific development into discrete stages: the stage of generation of new hypotheses; the stage of collection of relevant data; the stage of justification of possible theories; and the final stage of selection from among equally confirmed theories. The chapters, written by leading researchers, offer an interdisciplinary perspective on various aspects of the processes by which theories rationally should, and descriptively (...) are, built. They address issues such as the role of problem-solving and heuristic reasoning in theory-building; how inferences and models shape the pursuit of scientific knowledge; the relation between problem-solving and scientific discovery; the relative values of the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic view of theories in understanding theory construction; and the relation between ampliative inferences, heuristic reasoning, and models as a means for building new theories and knowledge. Through detailed arguments and examinations, the volume collectively challenges the orthodox view’s main tenets by characterizing the ways in which the different “stages” are logically, temporally, and psychologically intertwined. As a group, the chapters provide several attempts to answer long-standing questions about the possibility of a unified conceptual framework for building theories and formulating hypotheses. (shrink)

People don't always speak the truth. When they don't, we do better not to trust them. Unfortunately, that's often easier said than done. People don't usually wear a ‘Not to be trusted!’ badge on their sleeves, which lights up every time they depart from the truth. Given this, what can we do to figure out whom to trust, and whom not? My aim in this paper is to offer a partial answer to this question. I propose a heuristic—the “Humility Heuristic”—which (...) is meant to help guide our search for trustworthy advisors. In slogan form, the heuristic says: people worth trusting admit to what they don't know. I give this heuristic a precise probabilistic interpretation, offer a simple argument for it, defend it against some potential worries, and demonstrate its practical worth by showing how it can help address some difficult challenges in the relationship between experts and laypeople. (shrink)

This book is the first systematic treatment of the philosophy of science underlying evolutionary economics. It does not advocate an evolutionary approach towards economics, but rather assesses the epistemic value of appealing to evolutionary biology in economics more generally. The author divides work in evolutionary economics into three distinct, albeit related, forms: a structural form, an evidential form, and a heuristic form. He then analyzes five examples of work in evolutionary economics falling under these three forms. For the structural form, (...) he examines the parallelism between natural selection and economic decision making, and the parallelism between natural selection and market competition. For the evidential form, he looks at the relationship between animal and human economic decision making, and the evolutionary explanation of diversity in human economic decision making. Finally, for the heuristic form, he focuses on the plausibility of equilibrium modeling in evolutionary ecology and economics. In this way, he shows that linking evolutionary biology and economics can make for a powerful methodological tool that can enable progress in our understanding of various economics questions. Structure, Evidence, and Heuristic will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of science, philosophy of social science, evolutionary biology, and economics. (shrink)

Domjan, Cusato & Villarreal's target article is reviewed in the context of historical difficulty for learning studies in discriminating between learned and unlearned components of behavior. The research surveyed in the target article meets the criterion of differentiating between some learned and the unlearned aspects of social behavior, with Pavlovian conditioning shown repeatedly as a route by which reproductive and aggressive behavior is modulated.

Anthropology of Consciousness, Volume 33, Issue 1, Page 10-37, Spring 2022.

Heuristics are necessary but far from sufficient explanations for moral judgment. This commentary stresses: (a) the need to complement cold, cognitive-economizing functionalist accounts with hot, value-expressive, social-identity-affirming accounts; and (b) the importance of conducting reflective-equilibrium thought and laboratory experiments that explore the permeability of the boundaries people place on the “thinkable.”.

There is an under-appreciated tradition of genealogical explanation that is centrally concerned with social functions. I shall refer to it as the tradition of pragmatic genealogy. It runs from David Hume (T, 3.2.2) and the early Friedrich Nietzsche (TL) through E. J. Craig (1990, 1993) to Bernard Williams (2002) and Miranda Fricker (2007). These pragmatic genealogists start out with a description of an avowedly fictional “state of nature” and end up ascribing social functions to particular building blocks of (...) our practices – such as the fact that we use a certain concept, or live by a certain virtue – which we did not necessarily expect to have such a function at all. That the seemingly archaic device of a fictional state-of-nature story should be a helpful way to get at the functions of our actual practices must seem a mystifying proposal, however; I shall therefore endeavor to demystify it in what follows. My aim in this chapter is twofold. First, by delineating the framework of pragmatic genealogy and contrasting it with superficially similar methods, I argue that pragmatic genealogies are best interpreted as dynamic models whose point is to reveal the function – and non-coincidentally often the social function – of certain practices. Second, by buttressing this framework with something it notably lacks, namely an account of the type of functionality it operates with, I argue that both the type of functional commitment and the depth of factual obligation incurred by a pragmatic genealogy depend on what we use the method for: the dynamic models of pragmatic genealogy can be used merely as heuristic devices helping us spot functional patterns, or more ambitiously as arguments grounding our ascriptions of functionality to actual practices, or even more ambitiously as bases for functional explanations of the resilience or the persistence of practices. By bringing these distinctions into view, we gain the ability to distinguish strengths and weaknesses of the method’s application from strengths and weaknesses of the method itself. (shrink)

Alternative interpretations are proposed for the finding that market integration is positively related to fair behavior in experimental games. Market activities may produce market relevant concepts and stories that interpret experimental games as incidences of social exchange, and thus may enhance the relevance of (1) market-related preferences or (2) a decision heuristic designed for social exchange.

We study the performance of heuristics relative to the performance of optimal solutions in the rich domain of sequential search, where the decision to stop the search depends only on the applicant’s relative rank. Considering multiple variants of the secretary problem, that vary from one another in their formulation and method of solution, we find that descriptive heuristics perform well only when the optimal solution prescribes a single threshold value. We show that a computational heuristic originally proposed as (...) an approximate solution to a single variant of the secretary problem performs equally well in many other variants where the optimal solution prescribes multiple threshold values that gradually relax the criterion for stopping the search. Finally, we propose a new heuristic with near optimal performance in a competitive or strategic variant of the secretary problem with multiple employers competing with one another to hire job applicants. Both heuristics share a simple computational component: the ratio of the number of interviewed applicants to the number of those remaining to be searched. We present the subgame-perfect Nash equilibrium for this competitive variant and an algorithm for its computation. (shrink)

The term “moral heuristic” as used by Sunstein seeks to bring together various traditions. However, there are significant differences between uses of the term “heuristic” in the cognitive and the social psychological research, and these differences are accompanied by very distinct evidential criteria. We suggest the term “moral heuristic” should refer to processes, which means that further evidence is required.

This chapter contains sections titled: Constructivist Studies of Science and Technology The Origin and Development of the Social Construction of Technology The Social Construction of Technology as a Heuristics for Research Some Philosophical Questions Technology and Ideas Conceptual Issues Logic and Epistemological Issues Ethical Issues Issues of Political Philosophy Religious Issues References and Further Reading.

This paper examines the strengths and weaknesses of one of science's most pervasive and flexible metaprinciples;optimalityis used to explain utility maximization in economics, least effort principles in physics, entropy in chemistry, and survival of the fittest in biology. Fermat's principle of least time involves both teleological and causal considerations, two distinct modes of explanation resting on poorly understood psychological primitives. The rationality heuristic in economics provides an example from social science of the potential biases arising from the extreme flexibility (...) of optimality considerations, including selective search for confirming vidence, ex post rationalization, and the confusion of prediction with explanation. Commentators are asked to reflect on the extent to which optimality is an organizing principle of nature, a set of relatively unconnected techniques of science, a normative principle for rational choice and social organization, a metaphysical way of looking at the world, or something else still. (shrink)

The HeartMath system refers to various methods, tools and techniques developed by the HeartMath Institute, a global research and educational organization. Working from an interdisciplinary, scientific foundation, the institute has adopted a coherence model to promote its vision and mission of education and health. This model is based on empirical, predominantly natural scientific foundations. Although many, rigorous studies have provided a substantial evidence base of the science and praxis of personal, social and global coherence, the actual coherence experience has (...) not yet been investigated. To address this gap in the HeartMath research evidence, this heuristic phenomenological investigation was organized into three phases, with the goal of eliciting the essential structure of the coherence experience. The first phase consisted of a quantitatively orientated review of the author’s personal HeartMath practice records, with special focus on examples of highest coherence levels and achievement scores, as measured on HeartMath instruments, and as available on Heart Cloud records. In the second qualitatively orientated phase, ten selected descriptions, perceived to be good examples of coherence experiences, were synthesized into an essential review summary. The third, pilot study, phase explored the actual coherence experience of ten consecutive HeartMath sessions, varying with regard to context, duration, time, place and manner of practice. Essential summary findings of the coherence experience are discussed with regard to personal, social and global implications for research, education and health promotion. (shrink)

This article examines the connections among heuristics, the epistemological and ontological presuppositions that underlie theorizing, and substantive explanations in sociology. It develops and contrasts three heuristics: “doing as knowing” (DK), “categorizing as knowing” (CK), and “praxis as knowing” (PK). These are each composed of four dimensions: the theory of knowledge, the theory of reality, the theory of the growth of knowledge, and the theory of knowledge producers. The article then shows the importance of heuristics for empirical work (...) by demonstrating how they shape explanations in the sociological subfield of the historical sociology of knowledge. The essay draws two main conclusions: it argues that PK offers a more useful basis for developing explanations in sociology than either of the two alternatives (DK and CK) that currently shape substantive work; furthermore, it claims that the exposition of heuristic assumptions is an important task for sociology. (shrink)

A cognitive bias is a pattern of deviation in our judgment or our processing of what we perceive. Its raison d'être is the evolutionary need to produce immediate judgments in order to adopt a position quickly in response to stimuli, problems, or situations that catch our attention for some reason. They have a social dimension because they are present in the interactions and decision-making processes of ordinary life. They can be understood to be an adaptive response to human inability (...) to process all of the available information that we receive and selectively filter through biased reasoning or through procedures and heuristic rules. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the impact of digitalization and marketing automation on the “scope” of the heuristics adopted in the marketers’ decision-making processes. The “scope” refers to the decision-making contexts in which the use of the heuristic rules is diffuse and is effective. More precisely, “scope" is (the extension of) the field in which a heuristic can be applied (successfully). The article is based on evidence collected through ethnographic interviews with twenty-three experienced marketers to discuss the impact of marketing (...) automation on the scope of heuristic rules in decision-making. The marketers interviewed make extensive use of heuristics to manage their tasks as emerged from previous exploratory research. The paper discusses how the field of application of marketing experts' heuristics evolves as result of the digitalization and in particular of the use of automatic marketing systems. The adoption of the new automatic marketing tools modifies the task environment and the field of use of the traditional heuristic rules, but heuristics remain fundamental in the definition phase of the inputs for the automatic marketing systems, or for the interpretation of the output and therefore for the control of the marketing automation. The paper clarifies the concept of scope of heuristics and offers a rich description of the impact of marketing automation on scope. (shrink)