Information Overload 143
ably well equipped to process a great deal of incoming infor-
mation, it has its limits. To overcome these limits, people use
heuristics, or mental shortcuts or rules, to deal with both
simple and complex or ambiguous stimuli. These heuristics
essentially are informal and intuitive algorithms, or “rules of
thumb,” that our brains use for rapid problem solving and
general reasoning.
Heuristics can be incredibly adaptive and helpful. There
are heuristics that help you avoid dangerous animals, heuris-
tics that help you solve problems, heuristics that help you
know when to trust people, and heuristics that help you
make snap judgments. The downside is that heuristics are
prone to error. For example, one of the more well- known
heuristics, the availability heuristic, occurs when you make
judgments about the probability of something happening
based on how easily examples come to mind. In one study
published in 1974, two psychological scientists, Amos
Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, asked participants to decide
whether more words in the English language began with the
letter K (such as “kite,” “kabob,” and “kick ”) or whether
more words had the letter K in the third position (such as
“cake,” “joke,” and “hike”). Despite the fact that there are
twice as many English words with K in the third position
than in the first, most participants reported the opposite
because it was easier for them to recall words that began
with K.
Heuristics can also be problematic for your anxious
emotions. For example, if you have a fear of rats, you may
have developed a rule that all furry creatures that look and
act like rats should be treated as threats. Therefore, when
you encounter any rodent (a mouse, a gopher, a chipmunk,
and so on), you perceive it as threatening and react in an