Our brains sometimes do weird things.

We overeat even though we would like to be fit and healthy (I'm currently writing this article with a pint of Ben & Jerry's half baked ice cream sitting next to me), we smoke cigarettes even though we know that doing so is bad for our lungs, and we fail to save even though we wish to go on holidays and spoil our grandchildren when we retire.

Why?

Sometimes we do irrational things because we are susceptible to cognitive biases, which describe the mental processes that cause us to arrive at outcomes contrary to what standard logic would typically predict. One such bias is loss aversion — the reason why losing $100 feels about twice as bad as the equivalent happiness we feel from finding $100. Another is status-quo bias, which describes why we tend to leave things as they are even if the default option might not be the right choice (think of leaving the "yes you can send me promotional emails" box checked even though you know that the emails will probably annoy you later on).

Heuristics 101

Biases are sometimes by-products of heuristics — ways in which we simplify complicated problems so we can reach satisfactory results quicker than if we spend all day mulling over our options and calculating the probabilities involved.

Here's a semi-ridiculous example of a heuristic: Imagine someone places a yellow plate in front of you with some unrecognizable food on it. How would you figure out if the food is going to taste good? You could feel it with your hands (not recommended), smell it, compare it to images on Google, ask a friend, take a sample of it to chemically analyze, post a picture of it on Reddit, spend hours thinking about similar foods you've eaten — or you could just employ the 'well my mom used yellow plates when I was a kid and she's a pretty good cook' heuristic to save time. That might work 99% of the time. If you're eating at home, it becomes a no-brainer. When you see a yellow plate of food, it simply isn't worth the mental energy to worry about. Just dig in! But what would happen if I put a bunch of worms on a yellow plate and put it in front of you? You might start chowing down if your brain uses this shortcut, leading to an obviously bad outcome (the effectiveness of this vignette is based on the assumption that you do not like eating worms). See what I'm getting at?

Why we use heuristics

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