The advent of cognitive psychology provides an opportunity to test assumptions about human rationality by examining not just whether people are correct on reasoning problems but how people go about reasoning. The story of this lesson is that, while there is much cause for wonder in data on our thinking abilities, there is also much that should cause us to be more skeptical of the ultimate rationality of our decision processes. Before You Read the Text . The author does a fine job of covering the heuristics of human reasoning. A word of caution is appropriate before you read this section of the text.
Students often confuse heuristics and biases.
Biases can result from inappropriate application of heuristics, but heuristics themselves are not bad strategies. The point is that heuristics often help us to reason fairly accurately, though they can be misapplied. An interesting way to approach the material in this chapter is related to the distinction between algorithms and heuristics. Of course, we can't always use algorithms because there are no set algorithms for many types of problems. At other times, algorithms are possible but may be inefficient.