Heuristics are broadly responsible for many of our instinctive responses that undermine our society, such as racism. There are many well known psychological heuristics, awareness of which is enlightening in that it enables people to rise above instinct, to avoid being taken advantage of, or more sinisterly, to take advantage of others.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heuristic

See also - cognitive bias

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

A heuristic is a method to help solve a problem, commonly informal. It is particularly used for a method that often rapidly leads to a solution that is usually reasonably close to the best possible answer. Heuristics are "rules of thumb", educated guesses, intuitive judgments or simply common sense.

In more precise terms, heuristics stand for strategies using readily accessible, though loosely applicable, information to control problem-solving in human beings and machines.[1]

Example
Perhaps the most fundamental heuristic is "trial & error," which can be used in everything from matching bolts to bicycles to finding the values of variables in algebra problems.

Here are a few other commonly used heuristics, from Polya's classic How to Solve It:[2]

Look to the unknown.
If you are having difficulty understanding a problem, try drawing a picture.
If you can't find a solution, try assuming that you have a solution and seeing what you can derive from that ("working backward").
If the problem is abstract, try examining a concrete example.
Try solving a more general problem first (the "inventor's paradox": the more ambitious plan may have more chances of success).

[edit] Psychology
In psychology, heuristics are simple, efficient rules, hard-coded by evolutionary processes or learned, which have been proposed to explain how people make decisions, come to judgments, and solve problems, typically when facing complex problems or incomplete information. These rules work well under most circumstances, but in certain cases lead to systematic cognitive biases.

For instance, people may tend to perceive more expensive beers as tasting better than inexpensive ones (providing the two beers are of similar initial quality or lack of quality and of similar style). This finding holds true even when prices and brands are switched; putting the high price on the normally relatively inexpensive brand is enough to lead subjects to perceive it as tasting better than the beer that is normally more expensive. One might call this "price implies quality" bias. (Cf. Veblen good.)
Much of the work of discovering heuristics in human decision-makers was ignited by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman[3]. Gerd Gigerenzer focuses on how heuristics can be used to make judgments that are in principle accurate, rather than producing cognitive biases – heuristics that are "fast and frugal".[4]


[edit] Theorized psychological heuristics

[edit] Well known
Anchoring and adjustment
Availability heuristic
Representativeness heuristic

[edit] Less well known
Affect heuristic
Contagion heuristic
Effort heuristic
Familiarity heuristic
Fluency heuristic
Gaze heuristic
Peak-end rule
Recognition heuristic
Scarcity heuristic
Similarity heuristic
Simulation heuristic
Social proof
Take-the-best heuristic

Believe it or not,  there is a "policy theory" which is supposed to be used by governments to get around "quick educated guess" type policy development.

The problem is, to often these days, politicians, driven by public opinion, demand an immiedate response, which simply cannot be done within the proper policy cycle.

Bill