Our account of reasoning and choice is centered on the notion that people compensate for informational shortfalls by taking advantage of judgmental shortcuts, or heuristics. The notion of heuristics is a strategic notion, simple and evocative, and there are gains to centering a theory on such a strategic notion, among them clarity and coherence. But there are also risks.

The most serious risk is that heuristics become a buzzword, with every correlation between independent and dependent variables being taken as evidence of a new judgmental shortcut. To warn about this risk is the purpose of this chapter: It demonstrates empirically not only that a judgmental shortcut can be a means to determine the position to take on an issue, but that the “heuristic” can also be itself a consequence of the policy preference.

The analysis of this chapter is set within a larger metaphor, the notion of a chain of reasoning. Such a notion is familiar enough – the idea that first we start with basic premises, then work our way to an appropriate conclusion. But however familiar, the metaphor of a chain of reasoning seems to us misleading; misleading particularly in suggesting that people, starting with the most basic premises of an argument, work their way to a conclusion by moving systematically from the more general to the more specific. As against this presumption of orderly deductive inference, we shall try to show that political reasoning tends to be rather more lively, with people often starting at the beginning of an argument, then skipping directly to its conclusion, and only then filling in the intermediate steps in the argument.