After reading this chapter you should understand:

• The phrase ‘cognitive miser’ and why human behaviour can be characterised in this fashion
• The availability and representative heuristics, and their contribution towards biases like the false consensus effect and the anchoring of quantitative judgements
• How we act as ‘motivated tacticians’ and choose between heuristics and strategies of social inference
• Social categorisation and how it is used in social perception
• How categorisation contributes to stereotyping