Simulation Heuristic - Application

Application

The theory that underlies the simulation heuristic assumes that one’s judgments are bias towards information that is easily imagined or simulated mentally. It is because of this that we see biases having to do with the overestimation of how causally plausible an event could be or the enhanced regret experienced when it is easy to mentally undo an unfortunate event, such as an accident. Significant research on simulation heuristic’s application in counterfactual reasoning has been performed by Dale T Miller and Bryan Taylor.

- For example, they found that if an affectively negative experience, such as a fatal car accident was brought about by an extraordinary event, such as someone usually goes by train to work but instead drove; the simulation heuristic will cause an emotional reaction of regret. This emotional reaction is because the exceptional event is easy to mentally undo and replace with a more common one that would not have caused the accident.

- Kahneman and Tversky did a study in which two individuals were given lottery tickets and then were given the opportunity to sell those same tickets back either two weeks before the drawing or an hour before the drawing. They proposed this question to some participants whose responses showed that they believed that the man who had sold his ticket an hour before the drawing would experience the greatest anticipatory regret when that ticket won.

Kahneman and Tversky explained these findings through the understanding of the norm theory, by stating that “people’s anticipatory regret, along with reluctance to sell the ticket, should increase with their ease of imagining themselves still owning the winning ticket”. Therefore, the man who recently sold his ticket will experience more regret because the “counterfactual world”, in which he is the winner, is perceived as closer for him than the man who sold his ticket two weeks ago. This example shows the bias in this type of thinking because both men had the same probability of winning if they had not sold their tickets and the time differences in which they did will not increase or decrease these chances.

- Similar results were found with plane crash survivors. These individuals experienced a greater amount of anticipatory regret when they engaged in the highly mutable action of switching flights last minute. It was reasoned that this was due to a person “anticipating counterfactual thoughts that a negative event was evoked, because it tends to make the event more vivid, and so tends to make it more subjectively likely”.