The NY Times has a very good article illustrating the benefits of heuristic decision making processes over algorithmic ones. In this case, the author is talking about how long he spends making purchasing decisions. This is very familiar to me.
the time I spend overanalyzing prices will cost me way more money, in the form of opportunity costs and cognitive drain, than I could ever hope to save.
We generally believe that the best decisions come from examining all options and making a decision based on all available evidence. But, this evidence gathering comes at a cost: in this case, the personal resources (financial and otherwise) that are spent making the decision.
We need to accept that we can’t always make the best decisions, but we can make good ones. Generally, good decisions will make the most of our resources and free us to move on to other important things.
In cognitive complexity theory, one of the things we drive home is the idea that the situation might determine the maximum amount of complex thinking we can apply to a problem. For example, consider how the US might respond to another massive terrorist attack (or attack from another nation). When deciding whether to go to war or not, we can use more complexity if making a decision in the weeks or months before we are under attack, but in the case of a surprise attack, that kind of complex thinking could take lots of time and resources, two things we are desperately short of in the midst of an attack. In that case, taking the time and resources necessary to consider all the options (high complexity) might result in a slow response and the likelihood of more attacks, versus using heuristics and considering fewer options (lower complexity) which might allow a rapid response to avert another attack.
Link to the article: Getting Over Cold Feet: The Case for Impulse Buying – NYTimes.com.
