The prevalence and importance of purposeful information structuring among people making complex decisions or solving challenging problems is well established. Similarly, many researchers have found that this purposeful structuring follows and supports an early favorite decision candidate. It has been shown that decision makers often choose the alternative they earlier in the decision process isolated as a promising candidate. However, our knowledge of how early candidates are generated is sketchy at best. We generate and test the predictive power of a set of simple decision-making heuristics for generating early favorites. We show that the predictive power of these simple heuristics is moderate at best. This suggests that other processes and biases may be of equal if not greater importance, notably affect based reasoning and application specific biases (e.g. base rates).
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