Affect heuristic

What it is

Letting how we feel about something ("good" or "bad") stand in for a judgment of its risks and benefits.

Related

• Appeal to emotion fallacy
  Appeals to emotion work because of the affect heuristic: we let how we feel about something stand in for judging it.
• Halo effect bias
  A good feeling about one aspect spreads to the judgment of others.
• Attribute substitution bias
  A common easier question to substitute is "how do I feel about it?", the affect heuristic.

Appears in

• The 99 thinking errors in Rolf Dobelli's The Art of Thinking Clearly#66: Affect heuristic
• Kahneman and Tversky's heuristics and biases#11: The affect heuristic

References

• Wikipedia: Affect heuristic en.wikipedia.org
• The 99 thinking errors in Rolf Dobelli's The Art of Thinking Clearly en.wikipedia.org
• Kahneman and Tversky's heuristics and biases en.wikipedia.org
• Wikipedia: List of cognitive biases en.wikipedia.org
• Wikipedia: Cognitive bias codex en.wikipedia.org

More in “Deciding and acting: incentives, loss and commitment”