COGS-Q 101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Representativeness Heuristic
Document Summary
People often use (fast,intuitive) mental shortcuts (aka heuristics) to guide decisions, rather than (slow,effortful) reasoning according to laws of logic and probability. Example: representativeness heuristic uses similarity to assess relative likelihood of a description being true. Representatives: decision based on intuitive judgement of similarity to description. Insensitivity to prior (background) probability, insensitivity to sample size, misconceptions of chance (e. g. hot-hand fallacy) Availability : decision based on ease of recall. Resulting biases: overestimation of recent event types; underestimation of hard-to-imagine events. Anchoring & adjustment: decision based on adjustment of initial quantitative estimate. Biases: order of presentation effect; priming by irrelevant numbers. Heuristic processes are not observed directly, but theorized to explain observed biases in decisions/choices. For example: measure ease of recall in one group of subjects, use that to predict likelihood judgements in another group of subjects.
