Judgemental Statement In Decision Making Are Known As

The correct answer is A) Heuristics. Heuristics are mental shortcuts that people use to make judgments and decisions quickly when full analysis is impractical. Tversky and Kahneman popularised the idea in 1974 through three families: representativeness, availability and anchoring-and-adjustment.

• B) Intuitions are fast, automatic judgments that feel right without conscious reasoning. They are an outcome or feeling, not the name for the judgment devices themselves.
• C) Bounded Rationality is Herbert Simon's idea that decision-makers are limited by information, time and cognitive capacity, so they satisfice rather than optimise. It describes the overall condition of decision-making, not the specific shortcuts used in judgment.
• D) Biases are systematic errors that result when heuristics misfire. They are the consequences of heuristics, not the same thing.

The core concept here is the cognitive basis of judgment. For Mains GS-IV, this links directly to ethics in administration: a civil servant who recognises anchoring or availability bias in files, reports or public grievances can make fairer decisions.

Trap: Aspirants often pick Bounded Rationality because it is the more famous term, or pick Biases because the question mentions errors. Ask whether the option names the shortcut itself or the concept describing decision limits.