Page 160 - The Social Animal

142 The Social Animal

When Do We Use Heuristics? Of course, decisions don’t have
to be based on heuristics. Rachel’s mother might have carefully read
the ingredients on the cereal box, subscribed to a consumer maga-
zine, or consulted nutrition textbooks. Similarly, we could carefully
reason about an issue or study the record and accomplishments of a
politician; this would make us less likely to use our attitudes as a sim-
ple way to make sense of the world. And, occasionally, most of us do
go through the decision-making process in a rational manner.
This raises an important question: What conditions are most
likely to lead to heuristic employment rather than rational decision
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making? Research has identified at least five such conditions. As
you might expect from our earlier discussion of humans as cognitive
misers, heuristics are most likely to be used when we don’t have time
to think carefully about an issue, or when we are so overloaded with
information that it becomes impossible to process the information
fully, or when the issues at stake are not very important, so that we
do not care to think about it. Heuristics are also used when we have
little solid knowledge or information to use in making a decision.
A moment’s thought will reveal that the persuasion landscape
faced by Rachel and her mother contains many of the features that
lead to heuristic decision making. If she is like most Americans,
Rachel’s mother is feeling increasingly time-pressed since her leisure
time has eroded considerably in the last 10 years. As a consumer, she
faces a message-dense environment complete with a choice of more
than 300 different brands of cereal currently on the market. She
probably has had little consumer education or training. At the same
time, she has been the recipient of millions of advertisements, each
repeating and repeating a brand image, so that this image will quickly
come to mind in the aisles of the local supermarket. Given this state
of affairs, it is a wonder that all decisions aren’t made heuristically.

Categorization and Social Stereotypes

Before the Persian Gulf War of 1991, the U.S. Congress held a se-
ries of debates on the positive and negative consequences of going to
war.Those who supported the war described Saddam Hussein as the
“new Hitler”; they emphasized the parallels between Saddam’s
gassing of the Kurds and Hitler’s gassing of the Jews, Iraq’s invasion