Check whether your judgment is tracking affect, not the target attribute

When a decision "just feels right," ask whether the feeling is about the actual question or about your current emotional state.

Why it works

The affect heuristic is one of the most common substitutions: "How do I feel about X?" is answered in place of "What is the probability/quality/risk of X?" Positive affect inflates perceived benefit and deflates perceived risk; negative affect does the reverse. The feeling is a genuine signal about emotional state but is not a reliable signal about the target attribute.

How to do it

1. When a judgment arrives with a strong "gut feeling," label the feeling explicitly: "I feel good about this."
2. Then ask: "Is that feeling information about the actual question, or about something else entirely?"
3. Run the judgment again with the affect bracketed: "If I felt neutral, what would I conclude?"

Evidence

The affect heuristic is well documented: Slovic and colleagues demonstrated that positive affect lowers perceived risk and raises perceived benefit, and negative affect does the reverse, independently of any objective change in the thing being judged. Finucane et al. (2000) showed the effect experimentally — inducing time pressure strengthened the inverse risk–benefit correlation, evidence that people substitute a single overall feeling for two logically independent judgments. (observational)

Sources

• Slovic, Finucane, Peters & MacGregor (2002), "The Affect Heuristic," in Heuristics and Biases
• Finucane, M. L., Alhakami, A., Slovic, P., & Johnson, S. M. (2000). The affect heuristic in judgments of risks and benefits. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 13(1), 1–17.

Common mistake

Dismissing the affect entirely — good feelings can carry genuine information (expertise-based intuition). The goal is to check whether the affect is relevant, not to eliminate it.