Recognition heuristic

According to the recognition heuristic, when making a judgment about two items, the more easily recognized item will be considered to have a higher value.

Daniel Goldstein and Gerd Gigerenzer showed students in Germany and the United States lists of pairs of German and American cities. Each group was equally adept at picking the city with the larger population of each pair, despite differences in familiarity in the other country's geography. The experimenters theorized that the students were able to pick the right answers most of the time because they used a heuristic, according to which the more-recognizable city had a higher value.

However, it should be noted that the effect did not hold in another experiment where students were shown cities that were already known to be small, suggesting the heuristic is more complex or circumstantial than originally theorized.

References

• Goldstein, D. G., & Gigerenzer, G. (2002). Models of ecological rationality: The recognition heuristic. Psychological Review, 109, 75-90. .
• Goldstein, D. G., & Gigerenzer, G. (1999). The recognition heuristic: How ignorance makes us smart. In G. Gigerenzer, & P. M. Todd, (Eds.). Simple heuristics that make us smart. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Oppenheimer, D. M. (2003). Not so fast! (and not so frugal!): rethinking the recognition heuristic. Cognition, 90, B1-B9. .