Representativeness heuristic

Tool for assisting judgement in uncertainty

The representativeness heuristic is used when making judgments about the probability of an event being representional in character and essence of a known prototypical event. It is one of a group of heuristics proposed by psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in the early 1970s as "the degree to which [an event] (i) is similar in essential characteristics to its parent population, and (ii) reflects the salient features of the process by which it is generated". The representativeness heuristic works by comparing an event to a prototype or stereotype that we already have in mind. For example, if we see a person who is dressed in eccentric clothes and reading a poetry book, we might be more likely to think that they are a poet than an accountant. This is because the person's appearance and behavior are more representative of the stereotype of a poet than an accountant.

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