Simulation Heuristic

The simulation heuristic is a psychological heuristic, or simplified mental strategy, by which people determine the likelihood of an event based on how easy it is to picture the event mentally, and as a partial result people experience more regret over outcomes that are easier to imagine, such as near misses. It was first theorized by the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky as a specialized adaptation of the availability heuristic to explain counterfactual thinking and regret, though it is not the same as the availability heuristic; specifically, the simulation heuristic describes how perceivers tend to substitute normal antecedent events for exceptional ones when psychologically undoing a specific outcome. Kahneman and Tversky also believed people used this heuristic to understand and predict others' behavior in certain circumstances and to answer questions involving counterfactual propositions, mentally undoing events that occurred and then running mental simulations of those events with altered input values, illustrated by a study in which two men delayed by the same half hour in a traffic jam on the way to the airport were shown to experience different amounts of regret depending on how narrowly each missed his flight.