Heuristic
A heuristic can be understood as a mental act or shortcut that helps people to solve problems and make their judgments quite quickly and efficiently. These are like the rule-of-thumb strategies that plays their role in shortening the decision-making time and allow people to function without constantly pausing to think about their next course of action. Heuristics are quite helpful in several situations, but might lead to cognitive biases. Being aware about the working of the heuristics as well as how they introduce different potential biases might help one to make better and more to make more accurate decisions. The concept of heuristic was given by Nobel-prize winning economist and cognitive psychologist Herbert Simon while suggesting that while striving to make rational choices, the judgment of the person is subject to cognitive limitations. Here it should be specified that purely rational decisions logically involves weighing of all alternatives which includes potential costs against all possible benefits.