"mental shortcut" is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
It refers to a technique or strategy that the mind uses to quickly process information and make decisions without the need for extensive thought or analysis. One example of using this phrase could be: "In order to save time and energy, our brains often rely on mental shortcuts when faced with complex problems."
So brands are less needed as a mental shortcut.
The never-ending war between bicyclists, drivers, and pedestrians reflects a basic, and often wrong, mental shortcut, upon which we all too often rely: Who is in the right?
The team's catchers, for instance, met this week to discuss each Mets pitcher's key — a term used to describe a reliable way to solve a pitcher's problem, a mental shortcut to keep his delivery in sync.
Long ago, such a bias might have been a sensible mental shortcut: if you could picture a certain threat vividly, that was probably because it had occurred a few yards from you, in the place where you lived, and fairly recently.
And there are short chapters by practitioners, marketing folks in real companies who tussle with the issues of branding day in, day out.There is also an intriguing chapter by an anthropologist, John Sherry, who describes a brand as "a mental shortcut that discourages rational thought, an infusing with the spirit of the maker".
The affect heuristic (Slovic et al. 2007) indicates that emotion can be used as a mental shortcut that allows people to make decisions and solve problems quickly and efficiently.
By showing that the need to feel special and unique acts as a strong motivation for believing in conspiracy theories, Imhoff and Lamberty build on previous findings that the conspiracy mentality might be the result of cognitive biases and taking mental shortcuts, or about establishing feelings of control amid the bewildering complexity, if not chaos, of the world.
In "Thinking, Fast and Slow," Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman explains how we often rely on mental shortcuts.
Artefacts, though, are so variable that mental shortcuts are likely to be involved.
Instead, their decisions depend on a long list of mental shortcuts, which often lead them to make foolish decisions.
The best we can do is use what psychologists call "heuristics": mental shortcuts that help us draw conclusions quickly.
