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For example, people have long believed that ulcers were caused by stress, due to the representativeness heuristic, when in fact bacteria cause ulcers. [2] In a similar line of thinking, in some alternative medicine beliefs patients have been encouraged to eat organ meat that corresponds to their medical disorder.
The representativeness heuristic is seen when people use categories, for example when deciding whether or not a person is a criminal. An individual thing has a high representativeness for a category if it is very similar to a prototype of that category. When people categorise things on the basis of representativeness, they are using the ...
Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman first proposed that the gambler's fallacy is a cognitive bias produced by a psychological heuristic called the representativeness heuristic, which states that people evaluate the probability of a certain event by assessing how similar it is to events they have experienced before, and how similar the events ...
Other heuristics studied in behavioral economics include the representativeness heuristic, which refers to the tendency of individuals to categorize objects or events based on how similar they are to typical examples, [105] and the availability heuristic, which refers to the tendency of individuals to judge the likelihood of an event based on ...
[14] [15] It would have been incorrect, and an example of prosecutor's fallacy, to rely solely on the "1 in 400" figure to deduce that a given person matching the sample would be likely to be the culprit. Frequency tree of 100 000 battered American women showing the base rate fallacy made by the defense in the O. J. Simpson murder trial
The representativeness heuristic is a special case of availability. It stipulates that abstract base-rate information plays little role in quantitative judgments about event populations. Instead, these judgments are based on the sample of more concrete exemplars that are available to the individual at the time of decision making.
The psychologist Daniel Kahneman explains scope neglect in terms of judgment by prototype, a refinement of the representativeness heuristic. "The story [...] probably evokes for many readers a mental representation of a prototypical incident, perhaps an image of an exhausted bird, its feathers soaked in black oil, unable to escape," [ 4 ] and ...
Heuristics are simple for the brain to compute but sometimes introduce "severe and systematic errors." [6] For example, the representativeness heuristic is defined as "The tendency to judge the frequency or likelihood" of an occurrence by the extent of which the event "resembles the typical case." [13]