Heuristics are rush processes or sudden processes with the use of probabilities which people use to come up with a certain decision which is in need of an urgent solution (nku. edu, 2007). These heuristics are on one side helpful if the person come up with the right judgment and on the other hand could be of harm if a person fails to analyze the situation properly and uses the wrong heuristics he or she was indeed to use (nku. edu, 2007). Generally, these heuristics are of good use yet have the tendency to give some errors regarding biases of the people. Many useful things are products of these heuristics.
The point to make these things useful is to make the right use of these things with the proper understanding of what is the real use of such things. Some of these things are fallacies which can help us decide regarding our judgment. The first fallacy shown in the activity is the conjunctive fallacy. This fallacy is referred to be the act of having the tendency to believe that the combination of two events have the higher tendency to occur compared to the tendency of occurring only one of its parts (udel. edu, 2007). The availability of the stereotypes and its representativeness causes the occurrence of the conjunctive fallacy (udel.
edu, 2007). These kind of fallacy affects the view and perspective of a person regarding a situation in where there could have been two choices and these two choices causes a dilemma concerning about the right choice to make or the right perspective to choose. Another fallacy shown in the activity is the gambler’s fallacy. This fallacy is known to be the act of having the notion to have a certain mistake regarding the odds of a fixed probability of something could increase or decrease depending upon the recent occurrence of the event (Carroll, 2007).
This fallacy is often used in a situation where a person thinks he have already in the same situation before and thinks that he can make use of the recent situation he had undergone to make a clever move or act regarding his previous situation. With this, we can say that a person uses the gambler’s fallacy when he or she ends up in a situation where he or she base his or her decision from the recent occurrence of a fair situation that happens to him which if we look further have the same chance of getting the same result and also the same chance of getting other results (Carroll, 2007).
This fallacy is found to be useful for, what we can say, desperate people. The effectiveness of this fallacy is just based upon the luck of the person basing his decision upon the same situation which has the same choice of outcome yet not necessarily having the same outcome. The above discussed fallacies and concepts are found to be useful in the sense that they should be used properly with the right interpretation and understanding of these concepts and fallacies.
Having the right education regarding the right choice of fallacy and concepts to use depending upon the situation where you are in is a very important factor to be considered to come up with the right decision based on these concepts and fallacies. Yet, these concepts and fallacies don’t always guarantee you to have a great solution to your situation or to your problem. More often, these concepts and fallacies are being used unintentionally and unexpectedly due to some factors like cramming and having lack of time to decide due to the lack of the person’s ability to have a good decision under time pressure.
With the improper use of these concepts and fallacies people often come up with errors which could be ranged from simple errors to critical errors depending upon the weight of the importance of the situation to the person. On the brighter side, we can say that though errors may exists as we use these concepts, we are still very fortunate to be able to use them and from what we have encountered using them we must learn to produce our own way of decision making.From simple errors we learn and from critical errors we learn more.
Carroll, R. T. (2007). The Skeptic’s Dictionary. Retrieved July 17, 2007, from http://skepdic. com/gamblers. html. nku. edu. (2007). Judgment Heuristics and Biases [Electronic Version] from http://www. nku. edu/~garns/165/pptj_h. html. udel. edu. (2007). Descriptive Approaches to Decision Making [Electronic Version]. Retrieved July 17, 2007 from http://www. udel. edu/communication/COMM356/pavitt/chap12. htm.