Decision versus outcome
Απόφαση και έκβαση
Two things that get scored together and should not be. The decision is the reasoning you could run with what you had at the time. The outcome is what the world did afterwards, and it carries luck that was never yours to control.
How to spot it
Write the reasoning down before the result arrives. If the only record you keep is how it turned out, you have no way of telling a good decision that lost from a bad one that won.
The research behind the term
The term is not our invention. It comes from published research, and what follows is what that research found — our own synthesis of the published abstract, not a translation of the original.
Gigerenzer, G., & Gaissmaier, W. (2011). Heuristic Decision Making — doi:10.1146/annurev-psych-120709-145346
What it found
- Heuristics are efficient cognitive processes, conscious or not, that deliberately ignore part of the available information.
- The classical claim that a heuristic decision errs more than a "rational" one holds only when the assumptions of the rational models are met.
- Under genuine uncertainty, how well a heuristic performs is an empirical question, not a matter of principle — and it often performs better than a complex strategy.
How it found it
A review of research testing formal models of heuristic reasoning, distinguishing the descriptive question (which heuristics are used) from the normative one (when they are worth using).
What it means for decision making
A rule of thumb is not always a poor substitute for analysis; when the data are sparse and uncertain, ignoring information can be the right move.
Practised in
The term does not stay a definition. It appears inside missions where the pattern happens in real time and you have to recognise it as it happens to you.
Ambiguous Data
Sources
Every claim on this page maps to published research. The citations link to the original source.
- Gigerenzer, G., & Gaissmaier, W. (2011). Heuristic Decision Making — doi:10.1146/annurev-psych-120709-145346