Cognitive heuristics (shortcuts/bias) are an adaptive quality of efficiency. Each time one interacts with their environment, they are predisposed to rely on them in an effort to conserve psychological resources. Though these innate tendencies provide a means of efficiency and stability, they also reduce one’s ability to acquire and integrate novel information.
Both are essential adaptations; however, the former is an adaptive process of conservation, while the latter is progressive. The former would, at least in part, be a necessary function of everyday being. To reduce the use of cognitive heuristics while increasing acquisition and integration in all facets of everyday life would simply overwhelm the individual to a point of collapse and regression. Contrarily, if one simply relies on cognitive heuristics while never engaging in the process of acquisition and integration, stagnation results.
Rather, the ideal approach is the adaptable utility of both processes wherein either are utilized in their proper context. Cognitive heuristics are utilized in most mundane tasks for increased efficiency and reduced complexity, while acquisition and integration are utilized at particular moments of encounter with novelty and ambiguity that aid in comprehension, accommodation, and transformation.
Thus, an oscillating process between efficiency and integration provides a more balanced and wholesome approach to being — one that both preserves and transforms the individual. In this sense, one might think of the process as the oscillation between the cave and exploration: the cave as that which shelters, stabilizes, and conserves, and exploration as that which exposes one to novelty, ambiguity, and the possibility of development. Both are necessary. One preserves the individual from dissolution in the overwhelming complexity of life, while the other prevents him from becoming enclosed within rigidity and stagnation.
Michael Thacker 