SOC 104 Chapter Notes - Chapter 6: Santa Barbara City College, Cognitive Bias, Representativeness Heuristic
Document Summary
The importance of cognitive biases in everyday life: Those are not big problems in the overall scheme of things. But it turns out that what can appear to be very minor errors and surface biases can have significant consequences for humans. For one thing, if a lot of people make mistakes they might actually add up. Of course, the representative heuristic is one explanation people ignore the low baseline winning levels and focus their attention on the powerful likelihood of winning a huge prize. People may think, for example, that they are more likely to die from a terrorist attack or suicide than from diabetes, stroke or tuberculosis. But the probability of dying from health issues are much higher than from suicide or murder. Given that people do not adequately calibrate their behaviors to match the real potential risks, the individual and societal costs are quite high.
