Storytelling

Heuristics are mental shortcuts or "rules of thumb" that help us make decisions quickly without having to overthink. It’s like how we often use past experiences to make a good guess about something — for example, if dark clouds appear, you don’t need to check your weather app to assume rain is coming. We sometimes use heuristics to subtly nudge a user through their journey.

Literary devices are patterns and structures that writers use to make writing interesting to read, pleasant to hear, and memorable. Alliteration, the repetition of a sound at the beginning of a series of words (“perfect pair”), is one of the most common literary devices. There are dozens of others, all of which can convey a certain emotion without coming out and saying it.

In simple terms, a cognitive bias influences your decision making and judgement. Our brains like patterns and using as little effort as possible, so they try to take some shortcuts — cognitive biases are a result of that. They’re directly related to heuristics. Cognitive biases might sound negative, but there are some useful ones. Authority bias, for example, leads people to believe that opinions of authority figures are more truthful. It’s one of the reasons spokespeople are so popular in marketing.