What is the representativeness of heuristics?
Heuristics of representativeness is a heuristic (rule) that has been proven as a natural part of human knowledge. Like any other rule, it has pluses and minuses. Heuristics of representativeness claims that people see a common ability between items or people of a similar appearance or between an object and a group that seems to be part of. For example, culturally ignorant Western inhabitants could see how all brown skin people are part of the same group, although there are many brown skin races without each other. Kahneman would later win the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics. To test heuristics of representativeness, Kahneman and TVersky provided their objects the following information:
"Tom W. has high intelligence, even though it lacks real creativity. Apabs organization and clarity and neat and tidy systems in which every detail finds its appropriate place. forSci-fi type edit. He has a strong effort to compete. They seem to feel little compassion for other people and don't like integr with others. He himself focused, yet has a deep moral meaning. ”
entities that receive information were then divided into three groups, each of which was provided with a different decision -making task:
The first group was asked how Tom W. sounded nine different large companies. Most of the subjects were most associated with the engineering major and the least with a social science student/social work.
The second group was asked to estimate the probability that Tom W. was a member of one of the nine different large companies. These likelihoods were closely in line with the assessment of the similarity given by the first group.
Third group was asked to estimate what percentage of first year students were in each of the nine large companies, which is a question completelyunrelated to Tom W.
The results indicated that the entities had a high tendency to assign Tom W. to the engineering group based on the representativeness itself, even though students of engineering were relatively rare, which was basically less than 1/9 of all students. Given the representation on the basis of representations, the subjects ignored the probability of the background that Tom W. is in any main, regardless of his personal qualities. Extensive subsequent testing has found that this pathology is universal and applies in a number of problem domains.
Lessons from the representativeness of heuristics is this: instead of assessing something based solely on its qualities, consider the background probability and try not to do too many prerequisites.