I guess what you described goes by a well-known term called 'critical thinking'?
This is a set of both guidelines and heuristics, a set of patterns, if you will, which can be applied to situations or analyses. Some give you a fast route to a simple answer (Occam's Razor), some give pause before accepting what appear to be well-founded results (Simpson's Paradox -- I've encountered that before but had largely forgotten it). Some are simply shortcuts in estimation (order-of-magnitude, and log-based math -- multiplication and division become addition and subtraction).
Critical thinking has varying definitions, but I'd generally describe it as more structured and procedural than what's offered by @wegge. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_thinking