What are 'heuristics'?

In our daily lives, we do not have the time, knowledge or skills to make the perfect decision/choice every time, and it may be too exhausting and time-consuming to make really big decisions in a perfect way all the time. This makes us use mental shortcuts, or heuristics to make ‘good enough' decisions.

Also known as rules of the thumb, heuristics makes us jump forward instead of doing all the hard-thinking, based on tried and tested assumptions that may blind us from the changing world, where nothing stays the same.

When our heuristics make us do unreasonable things and ignore obvious dangers, it is termed as a cognitive bias, a systematic error that is based out of our unawareness.

These systematic thinking patterns form the mental models that make us perform automated functions, and blind our views towards reality.