The Power of the Substitution Heuristic
The idea behind the substitution heuristic is simple. When your brain encounters a question 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 gambling data europe 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. That feeling then influenced the answer to the second question about overall happiness. In other words, since overall happiness is harder to compute, the respondent’s brain simply used the heuristic of dating life happiness it recently encountered to answer the second question!
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