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The end of the Second World War saw an exponential increase in the number of supraand international organizations. They often establish guidelines that governments adopt when managing crises. Different organizations may have different understandings of problems, thus different information, definitions, strategies and policies. As a result, governments face ambiguity when transferring policies from the international to the national sphere. Crisis management and policy transfer literature have both highlighted the centrality of informational issues, yet their academic study remains isolated from each other. This article seeks to bridge them through a cognitive perspective and argues that, during crises, heuristics - the ability to exploit information in its environment - can help explain how organizational decision-makers transfer policies. In order to achieve this, the article examines the case of a particular crisis decision-making process: How the Mexican Congress transferred the definition of disappearances of persons from the international to the national sphere. Results show that the structure of information - its gaps and overloads -, affects both the type of heuristics and the degree of transfer. The research is relevant for understanding decision-making processes during crisis in the context of an increasing internationalization of policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]