Thinking and Decision Making: Cognitive Processes Explained

Introduction Every day you make thousands of decisions: what to eat, which route to take, whether a news headline is true. You probably think you're reasoning logically through each choice. But research reveals something uncomfortable your thinking is riddled with shortcuts, biases, and systematic errors. Understanding how you actually think (versus how you think you think) is the first step to making better decisions. Key Concepts Algorithm: A step-by-step procedure that guarantees a correct solution; slow but accurate (like solving math problems) Heuristic: A mental shortcut or rule of thumb that works quickly but isn't guaranteed to be correct (gut feeling, educated guess) Availability Heuristic: Judging likelihood based on how easily examples come to mind; more memorable = seems more common Representativeness Heuristic: Judging probability by how similar something is to a prototype or category; ignoring actual base rates Anchoring Bias: Your judgment