According to the take-the-best heuristic, when making a judgment based on multiple criteria, the criteria are tried one at a time according to their cue validity, and a decision is made based on the first criterion which discriminates between the alternatives.
Gerd Gigerenzer and Daniel Goldstein discovered that the heuristic did surprisingly well at making accurate inferences in real-world environments, such as inferring which of two cities is larger. The heuristic has since been modified and applied to domains from medicine, artificial intelligence, and political forecasting.