Medical X-Press – Staff Writer
“Children as young as nine years old use rules of thumb systematically when making decisions. But they are not as good as older children at telling when it is helpful to do so. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and the University of California, Berkeley, have investigated decision-making behavior in children and adolescents. Their findings have been published in Developmental Psychology. Which city has the larger population: Chicago or Akron? If you don’t know, you might base your judgment on which of the two names you recognize. This “recognition heuristic” often leads to astonishingly good results. After all, we are more likely to have read or heard about bigger cities or about more successful athletes, companies, or universities. There has been much research on the strategic use of the recognition heuristic in adults. But developmental psychological research investigating younger people’s use of the heuristic is rare.”(more)