What does heuristics and comparison have to do with it? It has to do with it, it has to do with it…! A clear example of this is the transmission of the Hyenas and the interview with a person who defines himself as a scientific informant. In fact, this subject runs into "judgment heuristics".
In social psychology, heuristics is a cognitive strategy, a thought shortcut that allows people to make social judgments more quickly, draw inferences, i.e. deductions, from the context and in the face of complex problems or incomplete information.
Over the years, several heuristics have been identified, one of the best known being the representativeness heuristic. By representativeness we mean an evaluation of the relationship existing between an element of a sample and the reference universe, between an example and a category. It is evident how precisely the use of this strategy leads to the emergence of a considerable quantity of "biases", ie errors.
This concept is used to estimate the probability that a certain element belongs to a certain population or category. For example, if a non-EU citizen steals, all non-EU citizens steal. If one politician is corrupt, all politicians are corrupt. And so if an ISF and a doctor make a comparison, all the ISFs and all the doctors make a comparison. Thus the alleged ISF of the Hyenas, victim of a heuristic of representativeness, as happens to cognitively less gifted people, generalizes the behavior of some as the behavior of all.
However, a second heuristic comes into play in this story and it is the so-called anchoring heuristic. By anchoring we mean that phenomenon whereby, having to provide an evaluation of a phenomenon, the subject uses a point of reference, called an anchor. Very often the anchor is made up of a known event: it can also be a family or personal element. Typical example is
