quality:corruption, linguistic:paraphrasing
Heuristics

Heuristics are procedures for making a decision without working out the consequences of every option. Heuristics decrease the amount of evaluative thinking required for decisions, focusing on some aspects of the decision while ignoring others. While quicker than step-by-step processing, heuristic thinking is also more likely to involve fallacies or inaccuracies.

One example of a common and erroneous thought process that arises through heuristic thinking is the gambler's fallacy — believing that an isolated random event is affected by previous isolated random events. For example, if flips of a fair coin give repeated tails, the coin still has the same probability (i.e., 0.5) of tails in future turns, though intuitively it might seems that heads becomes more likely. In the long run, heads and tails should occur equally often; people commit the gambler's fallacy when they use this heuristic to predict that a result of heads is "due" after a run of tails. Another example is that decision-makers may be biased towards preferring moderate alternatives to extreme ones. The compromise effect operates under a mindset that the most moderate option carries the most benefit. In an incomplete information scenario, as in most daily decisions, the moderate option will look more appealing than either extreme, independent of the context, based only on the fact that it has characteristics that can be found at either extreme.