The High-Performance Heuristic: Developments In the Psychology Literature

Heuristics is a widely disseminated concept in marketing. Heuristic processes are usually associated with low involvement decisions and sub-cognitive choice processes. There is an almost universal assumption that heuristics are used as a trade-off strategy by customers where a less reliable outcome is exchanged for less effort. Recently the concept of the high performance heuristic has emerged in psychology. It is proposed that heuristics are not used by decision makers as part of an input/output trade off, but because in many situations single input heuristics display absolutely superior predictive performance to more complex and structured cognitive strategies. The arguments that support this potentially very significant development for marketing and consumer behaviour studies are summarised and presented in this article.