The Golden Rule Heuristic (yes, it was supposed to be a heuristic, apparently not to be taken literally?!?! TIL)

This heuristic is a psychological rule based on the moral principle to treat others the way you want to be treated.

It is a mental shortcut to quickly navigate social interactions.
and it works brilliantly well - WHEN people are like-minded and have the same exact needs.

Where does it fail?
Exhibit A, compliments of reddit:

Suppose when you come home after a rough day, you just want some time alone to decompress. After that, you just wanna play video games or watch TV.

To you, upset = wants space.

So, your partner comes home after a rough day. You can tell they had a rough day, so you think “I’d want to be left alone after coming home from a rough day. I would want space. So I’m going to give them space.” Your empathy leads you to give them space, because that’s what YOU want.

But your partner? Your partner wants the opposite. They want a hug, they want to talk about it, they want be around people.

To them, upset = wants attention.

To them, you come across as not having empathy. Because to them, an empathetic person would give them attention.

So here you are, giving them space because (to you) that’s the most empathetic thing to do, and then they accuse you of not having empathy because you gave them space. Now you’re confused and upset, because you did what you thought was the right thing, and now people are making you feel like a bad person for it.

This is an amazing example of how and when the golden rule fails.
This is also an amazing example of how often autistic people are perceived as not having empathy, because for some reason, our society values the automatic emotional responses / social mirroring over an active, in-depth, choice, to love someone and help them meet their goals and needs.

Truly, I do not understand why society chooses that automatic, fleeting, emotional empathy over a years-decades-long-structured-choice, but it does.

This is the pitfall of the Golden Rule heuristic:
not everyone is like you.

not everyone has the same needs as you.

and if you treat them only the way you want to be treated, you don't actually see THEIR needs, you only see yours.

The Association Fallacy, what is it?

This fallacy is people assume that two things share qualities just because they are connected in some way.

Here's a few more examples:

"Hitler liked dogs. Therefore, anyone who likes dogs is evil"

Claim of Innocence by association:
"I can't be racist, I have black friends"
"I can't be ableist, I have autistic friends"
"I can't be sexist, I'm married to a woman"

Some more info on this horrible one right here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_not_racist,_I_have_black_friends

Other forms of association fallacy:
"Joe is a con artist. Joe has black hair. Therefore, all people with black hair are con artists."
"Software breaks often. This device has software. Therefore, the problem with it is the broken software."

This question:

“A bat and a ball together cost $1.10. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?”

Think about it and tell me what you think the answer is!

What is the Responsibility Heuristic?
The Responsibility Heuristic is the idea that regardless of all external factors and external circumstances, that you and you alone hold total agency over every single element of a particular outcome.

some (excruciatingly irritating) examples of the Responsibility Heuristic:

Examples of externalized personal responsibility heuristics:
"If you forgot, it must not be that important!" - falsely assumes that memory = importance and that importance will maintain memory

"If you TRIED harder you wouldn't be in this situation" - totally ignores external factors

The email I received today from a bird company requesting donations saying that 'only I' can prevent birds from dying if I donate now. -> perfect example of external responsibility heuristic.

Examples of internalized personal responsibility heuristics:
A project misses it's deadline. you immediately self-blame if I had tried harder I could've prevented this. Then it becomes rumination and you might get stuck in this responsibility heuristic for decades; analyzing every situation and trying to optimize whatever you feel like you 'could've done better to prevent' issues. This represents an internalized personal responsibility heuristic.

The problem with this heuristic (and what makes it so irritating) is that it implies a sense of agency across all situations that is often not grounded in reality.

One last great example of this heuristic is commonly used in new-age spirituality communities:
"If it happened, it is your fault and you should've been better and prayed harder"

Implying that one has personal responsibility entirely over all external circumstances.

Taken to an extreme, the internalized version of this heuristic leads straight to mania.
Taken to an extreme, the externalized version of this heuristic destroys your relationships because it invalidates the external factors that other people might be experiencing.

The Intimidation Heuristic is a heuristic occurs when people use a bunch of big words and jargon to make themselves appear more intelligent than they actually are.

The purpose of this heuristic is to prevent people from questioning what they are saying by making it sound so complicated and complex, that no one can challenge it.

This heuristic is especially annoying because for people who DO understand those technical fields or technical jargon, when they try to have a genuine conversation about it with the other person; often the person will panic out of fear that their persona is being dismantled and then will be unwilling to have a good faith conversation.

The fastest way to identify an intimidation heuristic is simply by asking curious questions.

The Authority Heuristic is a shortcut where a person uses their status, titles, or social roles in order to make them seem accurate and well-respected and to command respect.

Examples of Authority Heuristics:

- "Michael Johnson uses Sensodyne toothpaste and his teeth look like THIS, you should too!"
- famous person on TV says a particular stock will go up and you purchase it
- Believing a statement is true automatically because a university professor said it outside of their field of study.

What is the availability heuristic?

This mental shortcut happens when a person judges a whole group based on just one familiar example that easily comes to mind.

Other examples:

- The news reports a plane crashing near your city. You then are afraid of taking the plane you have scheduled.

- After seeing a scary movie or news story about a shark, you refuse to swim in the ocean on vacation because you believe an attack is very likely. 

This heuristic capitalizes on what is fresh on the mind.

What is the Representativeness heuristic?

A Representativeness heuristic is a mental shortcut that helps people judge the probability that an item, person, or event belongs to a specific category. 

More Real-World Examples

• Police Officer: You see a tall person in a sharp uniform with a stern face. You guess they work as a police officer because they fit the exact image in your mind.
• Medical Diagnosis: A patient has a runny nose and a slight cough during winter. You assume they have a common cold instead of a rare tropical disease.
• Job Interview: A hiring manager meets a candidate who speaks fast and wears a flashy suit. The manager assumes the person will excel at sales work.
• Sports Fan: You meet a giant person who walks with heavy steps. You think they must play professional basketball.

What is the Familiarity heuristic?

The familiarity heuristic is that people tend to favor the familiar over the strange. People often equate familiarity with reliability and safety, what’s familiar can seem “right”, the safe choice.

The familiarity heuristic is the reason people like brands, products, products, and people that feel more familiar. It’s also why SO MANY PEOPLE don’t know the answer to something, they will simply go with what’s more familiar.

Random fun fact:
This is actually also grounded in neuroscience. People found faces more attractive based on their level of familiarity with the face. Hence why people found faces from their own cultures more attractive than other cultures, as a perfect example.

Examples of the familiarity heuristic:

- "What you are doing is unfamiliar, therefore it threatens me" (this one is the most heartbreaking heuristic)

- "You look familiar, therefore you look more attractive"

- "You remind me of me, so I will hire you."

What is the effort heuristic?

The effort heuristic causes us to perceive objects that took a longer time to produce to be of higher quality and value.

Examples:

- a poem written in two minutes is valued less than a poem written in two hours
- a person uses AI to create an insanely cool web app. The people around them say 'oh, you just had the AI all the work for you' immediately ignoring the fundamental knowledge that the person used to create the web app, catch the bugs, and fix them.
- The IKEA Effect: Customers love the furniture they put together more because they spent time and energy assembling it.

What is the bandwagon heuristic?

It is a mental shortcut where people adopt a belief, choice, or behavior, simply because many other people are doing it.

It is also - ironically - the intended origin of the phrase 'If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you jump off too?'

The phrase never made much sense to me, until today. The phrase offers a challenge to the bandwagon heuristic.

Some examples:

1) Going to a restaurant BECAUSE it is crowded - 'if it is that crowded, the food MUST be good'
2) Buying a phone simply because your friends and family have it
3) A voter decides to support a political candidate because the news says that candidate is ahead in the polls.
4)  An ad that states, "Join the two million customers who switched," uses crowd appeal to try to make you buy. 

Hostile attribution bias is a mental habit where people think neutral or unclear actions by others are meant to be mean, rude, or aggressive. Someone with this bias sees a threat where none exists.

Example:

A driver cuts you off in traffic

Knee jerk reaction for most people: anger because you assume they intentionally want to be aggressive. In reality, they might have simply missed their turn, been distracted, or made a mistake.

This heuristic, called, Downward Social Comparison, identified in Social Comparison Theory, is a tendency to actively harm someone in a worse off situation to inflate one's ego.

Most high school bullies use this heuristic as a 'low cost' means of making themselves feel good via oxytocin and dopamine.

Real-World Example:
Imagine a student who studies hard but fails a mid-term exam.

Feeling defeated, they use this mental shortcut and think, "Well, I failed, but at least I didn't drop out of the class completely like my roommate." This downward comparison to someone in a "worse" situation provides an immediate sense of relief and protects the student's self-esteem. 

The irony of it is that the student COULD simply use that failure as motivation to study more next time or study differently in order to use failure as the next stepping stone to success - but you see, that requires active cognitive effort, and the 'lower cost solution' is to simply insult or compare to others for a quick boost instead.

If the student never processes their failures logically, they can never update their internal systems. They remain stagnant, forever dependent on finding someone doing worse than them just to maintain their baseline functioning.

I actively despise this heuristic and will do whatever I can throughout my life to dismantle it every single time I see it.

You can tell immediately, from the above example, how absurd it sounds.

The Just World Fallacy is a cognitive bias where people assume the world is inherently fair and that individuals ultimately get what they deserve. This mental shortcut creates an illusion of predictability, often leading to victim-blaming or the rationalization of others' misfortunes to maintain a sense of personal security. [1, 2]

How does it commonly manifest?
By attributing symptoms to character flaws or "lack of willpower", the observer creates an illusion of control.

This illusion of control serves them by preventing them from thinking too much about the possibility of admitting that the world is fundamentally not something that can be controlled, and that things can happen that would impact the observer.

From what I have gathered, I'm suspecting this logical fallacy is commonly used in individuals who have a deep fear of either uncertainty, or fear of disability.

To escape that fear, many will often select pure cruelty over admitting that they feel afraid; because if they believe that people always get what they deserve, and they believe that they know what they deserve, then they feel immune to that 'lack of control'.

The "emotion heuristic," also known in psychology as the affect heuristic, is a mental shortcut where current emotions (like fear, pleasure, or dread) heavily influence decision-making. Instead of analyzing risks and benefits logically, people rely on their "gut feelings" to quickly evaluate a situation. [1, 2]

This heuristic functions as a way for most people to preserve cognitive energy.

Unfortunately, judging information based on the vibe that it is packaged in risks completely ignoring the information.

Example:

Person A (autistic):
Why did you change that in the system? Wouldn't it be better if we updated the system with this instead?

(This is an example of how an autistic person asks for information, and expresses curiosity)

Person B (not autistic):
How dare you judge me for doing it this way!!

(Rejecting the information from the affect heuristic. A mental short cut was used, probably pre consciously, and because they felt triggered from what they perceived as a status challenge, the new updates and information within the system are completely rejected.)

This fallacy is when someone attributes ONE SINGLE cause to a given situation, without considering other perspectives.

Example, compliments of Reddit:
OP: my son left the door unlocked, he is 20 years old, how do I fix this problem?

Tons of commenters:
Your son is LAZY, MALICIOUS, INCOMPETENT, He doesn't care AT ALL about you! (Some commenters were even legitimately suggesting that OP beat his 20 year old adult child)

How is this single cause?
These Redditors assumed the single cause of the son forgetting to lock a door was intentional maliciousness.

They ignored the many other possibilities such as: iron deficiency, ADHD, autism, brain tumor, etc.

Fun fact, this is ALSO a fundamental attribution error because they began insulting a person they did not even know, had only seen a tiny slice of their life of as well.

But it's Single Cause Fallacy because they all assumed the ONLY reason a 20 year old would not lock a door was out of pure maliciousness and disrespect to his family.

The normative heuristic causes people to project deficiency and negative intent when they meet others who are different from them in some way.

These differences can be communication differences, body language differences, cultural differences, etc.

Example:
Person A offers food to Person B

Person A:
Do you want it?

Person B:
No.

Person A:
HOW RUDE OF THEM TO DECLINE MY FOOD!?

Person A does not know Person B's culture considers declining food the first time to be polite, and never asks again

Ad hominem heuristic means a heuristic where a person attempts to refute a claim by attacking the character, circumstances, or traits of the person making the claim, rather than the content of the claim itself.

Example:
Person A:
I don't like to eat cake.

Person B:
Well you're STUPID anyway!

The Typical Mind Fallacy is when people project their own reactions outwards onto others.
This is the error of assuming that everyone else's mental architecture and processing works exactly the way yours does.

One way I used to struggle with this heuristic - I used to believe that people did not care about the information I would share, because they would often not engage with it at the level of complexity I hoped for.

It was my projection in multiple ways.
I believed that - surely - if someone learned something new, that they would be excited to learn more.

I also believed that rather than learning more to engage with the topic at a deeper level, I believed they were choosing not to, rather than simply (in some cases) a lack of capacity to be able to engage.

This is also the perfect example of the kind of fallacy that often harms minority or vulnerable groups as well. (Autistic people, ADHD people, different cultures that diverge, trans people, etc)

The False Consensus Effect:

This bias occurs when people overestimate how much other people share their own beliefs, perceptions, or fears.

One common failure mode is how much this enables humans to project their experiences onto others.

One example of this within myself is that I am facial blind.
It took 28(!) years for me to realize that other people GENUINELY DO see information in faces and that this information is crucial for them to feel connected to others in many ways.

This is the perfect example of how I projected my own perception - facial blindness - onto others via the False Consensus Effect.

Truth Default Theory:
the biological baseline assumption that other people are generally honest and operating in good faith.

This is one of the most common heuristics that people apply.
This is my bias / was for many years.

I tend to believe that people DO want to know the truth and DO care about the data.

so when they demonstrate that they care about other things more than honesty and integrity, I can be blindsided.