Donald Green
Yale University
Dan Gendelman
Eshcolot
November 15, 2003
Strategic reasoning may be defined as “the art of outdoing an adversary” in a competitive setting (Dixit and Nalebuff (1991, p.ix). This art may take a variety of cognitive forms. It may involve the exhaustive assessment of all possible courses of action or more superficial analysis based on rules of thumb, called heuristics (Chi et al.1988). Teaching exhaustive assessment is matter of showing students how to recognize and evaluate all of the possible options available in a game. However, in complex strategic situations where decision-makers face time constraints, exhaustive search is impossible, and heuristic reasoning, a necessity. Performance in these situations is a
matter of making efficient shortcuts, examining in depth a narrowed set of options that look most promising.
Identifying this narrowed set of options properly is a matter of acquiring, applying, and adjusting strategic principles. Proficient chess players, for example, know to avoid moving their rooks’ pawns at the start of the game. Some players understand this as a hard and fast injunction, whereas others think of it as part of a broader injunction to build strength in the center of the board while leaving lines of pawn on the outside as a defensive wall behind which the king may hide later in the game. Players with a deeper understanding of chess know when to abandon this heuristic in favor of other strategic imperatives. As players confront novel strategic situations, the application of strategic principles becomes more tentative, and the principles themselves more subject to change (Xia 1998).
Teaching people to think strategically is thus a matter of showing them how to search efficiently for solutions and to adjust their operating principles to fit the strategic situation at hand. Whether these skills can be taught is an empirical question. The wide
variance in proficiency in games like chess may be regarded as a function of irreducible individual differences in cognitive ability, or instead as a function of practice in the application of heuristics. This essay provides evidence that at least some heuristic knowledge can be made explicit and represented in a teachable form.
