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decision making
Your brain prefers simple patterns over complex reality.
The 'Representativeness Heuristic' leads you to judge the probability of an event by how much it resembles your mental prototype.
If you describe a shy person who loves reading, you are more likely to guess they are a librarian than a salesperson. Your brain ignores base-rate statistics in favor of a compelling mental image.
You value a good story over accurate probability.
Where this comes from
- Study
- Kahneman and Tversky, 'Judgment under uncertainty', 1974
- What the check found
- The definition aligns with the seminal 1974 paper by Tversky and Kahneman, which identifies representativeness as evaluating probability based on the similarity between an object and a category.
- Confidence
- Well replicated
Related
One of these every day, and every one names the study it came from. When a finding is contested, it says so.