Cues and Heuristics Article

1. What are heuristics? What three classical examples of heuristics do the authors mention? What common theme may underlie many heuristics?
      Heuristics are mental shortcuts or thinking aids. Tversky and Kahneman first identified three canonical heuristics; availability, representativeness, and anchoring and adjustment. Findings in the various fields from social persuasion through metacognition suggest the common themes of how familiarity, context, experience, and evaluability can make cues easy to access.
2. How may effort be reduced in common heuristics? What is the main question that the authors are trying to address in this article? How does this question relate to the availability heuristic?
      Effort my be reduced by using heuristics such as considering fewer alternatives, identifying only brand names, and using information that is easier to access. The article is about finding ways in which information can be accessed the easiest. Availability integrates the common heuristics which reduce effort in finding cues.
3. What are cues, and what are their main parts?
       Cues are pieces of relevant information, that are easy to access when making decisions. Cues have two separate parts: a type and value. The type involves brand names and other labels. The value considers what it is made up of and how efficient it is.
4. The authors discuss two ways that cues can be acquired, and also how these cues can be evaluated. What are the possible ways that cue acquisition can occur? How can cue acquisition and cue evaluation be made easier?
       Cue acquisition can occur by cue perception and cue production. In cue perception, people use task environments and perceive only information that they have already accumulated. Cue production is when people retrieve previously seen cues from memory or assess new cues. Cue evaluation is how people use cues to make a judgment or decision by evaluating the importance of cue types and values. Cue evaluation and acquisition can be made easier if they are more common across many alternatives.
5. How can perception of cue types be made easier? What is phonetic fluency, and how might it work? If people are deciding which stocks to buy, does it matter if the name of a company is easy or hard to pronounce? Does the font in which the cue value is printed matter when one judges what the quality of a product is? Do backgrounds of Web sites affect how easily we can perceive cues for a decision?
      The perception of cue types can be made easier by phonetic fluency and conceptual priming. Phonetic fluency is the sound or flow of words. When choosing from foods from a menu of a foreign language, people are likely to pick the one that sounds the most pleasant. When people are buying stocks they weighed those with easier-to-pronounce names heavier. Because of priming, people will consider web sites that have backgrounds that have images to associate with different cues and font that is easier to read.
6. Sometimes the cues are not present to be perceived but rather have to be remembered by us (cue production). Might positive audience responses make cues easier to remember? Are cues that are used repeatedly easier to remember? Will they then have a greater effect on our decisions than other cues might? Do contexts affect how easily we remember different cues?
       Repeated studies have shown that there is an association between "audience response" and "message quality." If an audience responds enthusiastically, it's usually because the speech was well-phrased with convincing messages. The repeated use of a cue can increase how easily it is retrieved. In context, psychological distance makes higher-level information easier to access.
7. Are some values of cues easier to remember than others are? If so why?
       Cue values can be more accessible during cue production if they stem from natural assessments, or things seen on a regular basis. Because of attribute substitution, easy cues in place of hard, cues are easier to reach the more they've been used.
8. What makes different cues easy to evaluate? How might we simplify information that we are using to evaluate different choices?
       Different cues are easy to evaluate because you're only comparing two objects without using numerical values by just remembering which one had the better of  which qualities. When comparing two cars, instead of remembering the numeric values and different units of things like mpg, hp, age, engine size, etc. just know if one was better, worse, or equal.
9. Why is ease of access to information so important for decision making and judgment?
       Heuristics that use cue types are more common than those using cue values. The ease and efficiency of information access is important because it requires the least amount of effort of people and can allow for decisions and judgments to be made faster and still attain the most desirable outcome. It also allows us to reach a decision without having to consider and access every characteristic and attribute of every alternative, because that would make ordering a meal from a menu take days if not longer, and our brains would overload.