Heuristics Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Heuristics (or heuristic algorithms) are problem-solving procedures that, while may yield acceptable results in practice, provide no guarantees of yielding “good” solutions in general. Specifically, an algorithm is called heuristic if it cannot be shown to yield a result to be correct, correct within a known error of approximation, or correct with known probability.

Generally, heuristics are used for problems that are too difficult to be solved correctly, or where a provably correct procedure is too expensive, time-consuming, or cognitively complex. In political science, heuristics are used for both solving statistical models and developing political-behavior models.

Political methodologists often use complex statistical models to analyze political phenomena. While simple linear models and simple, globally concave nonlinear models are usually straightforward to solve exactly, statistical functions with many discontinuities or local optima may require heuristics for practical solution.

Cognitive heuristics, pioneered by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s Nobel Prize-winning work on prospect theory, are often incorporated into models of political and social behavior. These heuristics represent alternatives to standard models of rational choice for individual behavior, in which individuals are assumed to possess unbounded rationality, attention, and problem-solving ability. However, while it is plausible that people often behave heuristically, there are a large variety of theoretically plausible cognitive heuristics, especially where the decision-making environment is complex; thus social scientists face a significant challenge in discovering which heuristics adequately capture or predict real behavior.

Bibliography:

Gilovich, Thomas, Dale Griffin, and Daniel Kahneman, eds. Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Michalewicz, Zbigniew, and David B. Fogel. How to Solve It: Modern Heuristics. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2004.

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