The Development of Thinking and Reasoning

7Heuristics and biases Insights from developmental studies

Kinga Morsanyi and Simon J. Handley

When people are looking for a solution to a problem or they have to decide between choice options, they often rely on simplifying heuristics rather than on formal logic or rule-based argumentation. Moreover, the use of heuristics is just as common in real-life settings as in psychology laboratories, and it pervades all aspects of life. For example, when reading a piece of text, people judge the writer to be more intelligent if the text is easier to process (Oppenheimer, 2006), rhyming versions of aphorisms seem to be truer than non-rhyming aphorisms with the same meaning (McGlone & Tofighbakhsh, 2000), and arguments are judged to be stronger if they ...