the recognition heuristic, originally termed the recognition principle, has been used as a model in the psychology of judgment and decision making and as a heuristic in artificial intelligence. the goal is to make inferences about a criterion that is not directly accessible to the decision maker, based on recognition retrieved from memory. this is possible in an environment (reference class) r where the recognition of alternatives a, b É r positively correlates with their criterion values. for two alternatives, the heuristic is defined as: full text (pdf).  the recognition heuristic is part of the âadaptive toolboxâ of âfast and frugalâ heuristics proposed by gigerenzer and goldstein. it is one of the most frugal of these, meaning it is simple or economical. in their original experiment, daniel goldstein and gerd gigerenzer quizzed students in germany and the united states on the populations of both german and american cities. participants received pairs of city names and had to indicate which city has more inhabitants. in this and similar experiments, the recognition heuristic typically describes about 80-90% of participantsâ choices, in cases where they recognize one but not the other object (see criticism of this measure below). surprisingly, american students scored higher on german cities, while german p
Heuristics