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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 ...
Gigerenzer & Gaissmaier (2011) state that sub-sets of strategy include heuristics, regression analysis, and Bayesian inference. [14]A heuristic is a strategy that ignores part of the information, with the goal of making decisions more quickly, frugally, and/or accurately than more complex methods (Gigerenzer and Gaissmaier [2011], p. 454; see also Todd et al. [2012], p. 7).
The most common heuristics used are attribute substitution, the availability heuristic, the representativeness heuristic and the anchoring heuristic – these all aid in quick reasoning and work in most situations. Heuristics allow for errors, a price paid to gain efficiency.
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 availability heuristic (also known as the availability bias) is the tendency to overestimate the likelihood of events with greater "availability" in memory, which can be influenced by how recent the memories are or how unusual or emotionally charged they may be. [20] The availability heuristic includes or involves the following:
Attribute substitution is a psychological process thought to underlie a number of cognitive biases and perceptual illusions.It occurs when an individual has to make a judgment (of a target attribute) that is computationally complex, and instead substitutes a more easily calculated heuristic attribute. [1]
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 ...