The psychological drive behind all of this is our innate reliance on heuristics. Heuristics are a powerful ability that our minds possess that augment our everyday decision making, covering everything from deciding on the location of a new house, to simpler tasks like object recognition. It is heuristics that allow us to quickly build a picture of our everyday environment and solve problems. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Heuristics are psychological and cognitive shortcuts. When, for example, we see the wheel of a car in a darkened image, we would be primed by our past knowledge and associations to expect to see the rest of the car. This in turn allows us to make the decision to return to the sidewalk as soon as we spot the car turning the corner. Heuristics therefore prepare us to anticipate an outcome, given our past experience, our knowledge of the situation, or our expectations in the given context. Unfortunately there is a downside to this otherwise efficient means of making sense of our world. As mentioned in the first paragraph, it is also our reliance on heuristics that leads to overgeneralization of issues, and the stereotyping and stigmatization of people or objects. In our current era, for example, it is these stereotypes that lead to hate crimes committed against minorities and discrimination faced by refugees. Studies that investigate how heuristics are developed and applied are suitable for this. An example of this is a study showing that people tend to underestimate or overestimate the risk of specific events and incidents, depending on how easily the examples come to mind. In the study it was found that people overestimated the number of deaths caused by accidents; which are often widely reported in the media and underestimate the number of deaths caused by common diseases; which often don't get much publicity. In fact, these diseases cause 15 times more deaths than accidents. Another example could be the stigmatization of psychiatry and psychological disorders. Due once again to persistent and inaccurate media portrayals, a survey conducted in Germany found that 25% of respondents still believe that patients do not leave psychiatric hospitals, and an astonishing 50% of respondents believe that straitjackets are still in use. Please note: This is just an example. Get a custom paper from our expert writers now. Get a Custom Essay Therefore, although heuristics are a great tool for allowing us to make decisions efficiently in our daily lives, they are not foolproof and are prone to producing incorrect judgments if we invoke inappropriate contexts. We should therefore be cautious about overly accepting generic representations of situations, institutions and people in the media, and attempt to delve behind the veil to distinguish for ourselves the representations from reality..