Heuristic: A mental shortcut that allows decisions to be made quickly.  Decision-making 
requires a reduction in uncertainty and simplification of complexity.  Because people 
encounter such an overwhelming amount of information, they need shortcuts to make 
decisions quickly and efficiently. 

Availability: A mental shortcut that leads to judgment based on how easily a belief structure 
comes to mind... how easily it comes to mind.

Representativeness: A mental shortcut that leads to a judgment based upon how similar a 
specific case is to a typical case.  But, representativeness may cause people to ignore base 
rate information... which is the frequency of occurrence in a population.

Anchoring: having a reference point, and then making adjustments or judgments in relation 
to the reference point.  Rather than focusing on absolute gains, actors focus on relative 
gains.


other discussed psychological concepts...

Motivated Bias: ÒSee what you want to see.Ó Motivated bias can lead to faulty assessment 
of an adversaryÕs resolve, overconfidence, insensitivity to warnings, and thus defeat 
deterrence. Defensive Avoidance: avoid, dismiss, deny warnings that increase fear. 

Unmotivated Bias: ÒSee what you expect to see.Ó

Fundamental Attribution Error: attributing blame to the environment or situational causes 
when the self is involved, but attributing blame as a flaw or characteristics of the person, 
when other people are involved.

Self-fulfilling prophesy: having a belief about someone or something which is not 
necessarily true.  Then behaving as if the belief is true will make the outcome exactly like 
the original belief.  Example: Bias beliefs that are not true, can actually become true.  Susie 
believes that she will fail this test.  So she acts as if failing is inevitable.  Therefore, she 
actually does fail.