The Simulation Heuristic.¶
Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1981/1982). The Simulation Heuristic. Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases.
Cited by¶
2 citations across 2 artifacts.
Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.
Primes¶
- Counterfactual Reasoning
- The process operates across regret psychology (ruminating on roads not taken), blame and responsibility attribution (considering alternative actions the agent could have taken), educational learning (productive failure and deliberate reflection on counterfactual solution paths), medical decision-making (mental simulation of alternative treatment scenarios), legal reasoning (but-for counterfactuals grounded in cognitive narrative construction), and AI/ML fairness (generating minimal counterfactual input perturbations that flip model decisions).
This sourceIntroduces the simulation heuristic and the Mr. Crane / Mr. Tees near-miss vignette; ease of mentally undoing an outcome drives judged regret.
Supported in partVerified against the work's full text
The chapter grounds counterfactual simulation (ease of mentally undoing an outcome) but does not address the education, medical, legal, or AI-fairness domains listed.
“Rather, we construe the output of simulation as an assessment of the ease with which the model could produce different outcomes, given its initial conditions and operating parameters.”
- The process operates across regret psychology (ruminating on roads not taken), blame and responsibility attribution (considering alternative actions the agent could have taken), educational learning (productive failure and deliberate reflection on counterfactual solution paths), medical decision-making (mental simulation of alternative treatment scenarios), legal reasoning (but-for counterfactuals grounded in cognitive narrative construction), and AI/ML fairness (generating minimal counterfactual input perturbations that flip model decisions).
- Counterfactuals
- Counterfactual thinking as emotional and motivational process (Kahneman and Tversky 1981)
This sourceIntroduces the simulation heuristic; regret/counterfactual intensity predicted by the ease and distance of mental simulation.
Supported in partVerified against the work's full text
Gives Kahneman & Tversky's simulation heuristic - scenario construction as a cognitive operation - backing only the counterfactual-simulation half of the claim, not its emotional or motivational framing.
“To advance the study of availability for construction, we now sketch a mental operation that we label the simulation heuristic.”
- Counterfactual thinking as emotional and motivational process (Kahneman and Tversky 1981)
Verification¶
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