Assignment 1 was both interesting to me and helpful through explaining how people work on a deeper level. The concept of heuristics and the examples given to explain the individual strategies changed my perspective of people a bit by making me realize how these strategies seem helpful when just analyzed at face value. It’s also helped me to reconsider my actions through seeing the pitfalls of the four heuristics mentioned, especially in the case of the anchoring and adjustment heuristic. In my opinion, the information provided in the book that even professionals in their fields are affected by the use of this heuristic was scary to me, although in my assignment I didn’t put a major stress on this as it related to the prompts. Through writing the paper, however, I found that I was sitting in front of the paper simply trying to choose an example to incorporate rather than just thinking of one, which made me realize just how many flaws are associated with each of the heuristics.

As I have an interest in going into the field of social work, the assignment and the related in the textbook helped me to consider the long-term implications of these heuristics’ flaws and how they affect multiple people. While it can primarily affect the individual, who uses the heuristic in a negative way, it has the potential to affect large groups of people when utilized by people in power. The only sentiment that I could conjecture is that the general public largely doesn’t study information on heuristics to a degree that they would readily know it and be consistently aware of the downsides of utilizing them in everyday life. While doing the assignment helped me to fully understand the issues involved, my subsequent reflection pushed me to realize what each individual has to do in order to avoid these flaws. Additionally, I realized how educating the public on these issues (as they may relate to social issues such as stereotyping and covert bias in different settings) would likely help the general public.

I chose this image as it represents what’s possible when people in power use heuristics and masses of people may be undermined when we openly accept the simplicity of heuristics and don’t analyze them on a deeper level.