When your brain encounters a question

[Shishirgano9]

Surprisingly, the correlation between the two answers was just about zero! As it turns out, the activeness of ones dating life was not what immediately came to mind when the students were asked about their level of happiness. However, a different group of students saw the questions in reverse order: How many dates did you have last month? How happy are you these days? In this case, the degree of correlation was off the charts! So why the difference in results between the two approaches? The secret lies in a principle Kahneman refers to as a substitution heuristic.



The Power of the Substitution Heuristic The idea behind costa rica cell phone number list the substitution heuristic is simple. it finds hard to answer it naturally looks for a question based on the original but that’s easier to answer. This is called a heuristic question. For example, if I asked you what 17 x 24 was you might be challenged to compute the total in your head. However, if I pushed you to try, your brain might consider multiplying 20 x 20 as a “close enough” shortcut.



The heuristic question yields an easy answer of 400 whereas the original question yields a more difficult, but not far off (2% to be precise), answer of 408. The same thing happens with the two questions above. Asking someone about the degree to which they’re happy overall is difficult to answer. There are many factors that feed into one’s happiness. However, when students were asked about the number of dates they had, the degree to which they were happy with their dating life became top-of-mind.