ABSTRACT
In 1974, Daniel Kahneman and his partner Amos Tversky made a ground-breaking discovery. They identified that the human brain was capable of taking mental short-cuts to solve problems or issues that we are faced with. They named this as a 'heuristic'. Kahneman and Tversky suggested that there are three types of heuristics: availability heuristics, anchoring heuristics, representativeness heuristics. Availability heuristics help to estimate the probability and likelihood of something happening based on information we can recall. Anchoring heuristics are based on the idea that we often take decisions related to specific reference points within our memory. Representativeness heuristics help people to predict the probability of something happening based on the proportion of relevant items in play. The representativeness heuristic is significant in our world of safety. Heuristics can be helpful, but we should be minded to note that they can also lead to errors.
