Question

Comment in one or more than two paragraph this discussion ?

Discussion—Behavioral Heuristics

There was an incident a couple of years ago where my first partner when I got the job (we both started at the same time) had made many poor decisions both in and outside of work.

The heuristic that came up regarding my first partner whom we’ll call Gina for this post was that of expectation or the positive expectation bias, which often fuels gambling addictions and contributes to the "hot hand" misconception (Dvorsky, 2013, Paragraph 7). Very early on it was clear that she was extremely unorganized and had a hard time managing her caseload with me. When someone explained to Gina that anything she didn’t complete during the week would be made up by on-call staff, she took advantage of this on the weekends and evenings on many occasions, resulting in a lot of ire from our co-workers, until it reached a point that no one wanted to work with her, myself included. It became her expectation that she didn’t necessarily need to work hard and would consistently pile up work for everyone else. Needless to say, this sparked a change in expectations of employees to get their work done and not putting it off until Fridays and Saturdays.

For my part, because my name was attached to Gina as we were partners, I often tried to pick up the slack and keep everything in line for her. This only furthered her expectations that if she doesn’t do the work, someone else will for her. In hindsight, I could have responded differently and simply let her get in trouble the many times she probably should have, while also trying to help her to be more productive overall.

Answer 1

Heuristics are defined as cognitive shortcuts that simplify decisions. It is an approach that employs a practical method, not guaranteed to be perfect but good enough to meet the immediate goals.

In the given case, Gina suffered from a behavioural heuristic known as the positive expectation bias. That is, she always believed in positive outcomes of her actions and downgraded any ideas of failure or in conflict with those expectations. This eventually led to her crossing limits at work where everybody including her partner (the author), started disliking her approach towards work.

The heuristic used by the author was representative heuristic, that is, he decided to pick up the slack and keep everything in line for her, since that was the best alternative available in this uncertain situation. However, his efforts did not work and this only furthered her expectations that someone else would always do her work.

The heuristic used by the partner is anchoring heuristic as she started with an implicitly suggested reference point (when she was told that her work lags were being completed by others) and then she made adjustments to it to reach her estimate.