Heuristic

Research

A practical mental shortcut producing a good-enough answer at some cost of accuracy; in cognitive psychology (Kahneman & Tversky) heuristics explain systematic biases, and in research methods, any rule of thumb used when an exhaustive method isn't practical.

Sources

1. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — “Bounded Rationality”, Gregory Wheeler (first published 30 November 2018; substantive revision 13 December 2024) plato.stanford.edu accessed 22 September 2026

Gregory Wheeler’s entry on bounded rationality defines heuristics as “simple rules of thumb for rendering a judgment or making a decision”, and records the programme this entry refers to: “Kahneman and Tversky conducted a series of experiments showing various ways that human participants’ responses to decision tasks deviate from answers purportedly derived from the appropriate normative standards.” The entry also records the dispute worth knowing before calling a heuristic an error: Gigerenzer’s “fast and frugal heuristics” programme argues many heuristics perform well, while “Kahneman and Tversky maintain that the dispute is merely terminological.”

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is cited because it carries a named author and a dated revision for each entry, so the claim is attributable to a person on a date — which is the test this lexicon applies to reference sources, and the reason an open-edit encyclopedia is not used. The application to research practice above is this lexicon’s reading.

Deeper treatment: this term also has a full entry in the Business Library.

Related terms

• Abbreviation
• Abstract
• Abstraction
• Academic Database
• Analysis
• Annotation

Rewritten from a truncated AJG archive entry, August 2026.