George Polya published How to Solve It in 1945. This publication marked a pivotal moment for the study of heuristics and drew upon ancient Greek methods described by Pappus of Alexandria over two millennia earlier.
Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky developed heuristic research in the 1970s through extensive experiments. Their work revealed systematic errors humans make when using mental shortcuts and led to the proposal of attribute substitution in 2002 with Shane Frederick.
Herbert A. Simon introduced bounded rationality during his research on human decision-making to argue that people cannot always find perfect solutions due to cognitive limits. He coined the term satisficing to describe accepting choices that are good enough rather than optimal.
Gerd Gigerenzer and his team found that simple rules often outperform complex algorithms under conditions of uncertainty. Heuristics like recognition or take-the-best achieve higher accuracy with less effort when information is missing, challenging the assumption that more data always leads to better results.
Anchoring and adjustment remains one of the most studied heuristics in behavioral economics today alongside representativeness heuristic and availability heuristic. Anchoring causes people to base future judgments heavily on initial information, while availability makes individuals judge event likelihood by how easily memories come to mind.