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Representativeness heuristic leads to faulty judgments from "summary" of Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
The representativeness heuristic is the tendency to judge the likelihood of an event based on how closely it resembles a prototype or stereotype. When people rely on this heuristic, they often make judgments without considering other relevant information. This can lead to faulty judgments because the representativeness heuristic ignores base rates and the size of the reference class. For example, when people are asked to judge the probability that a person is an engineer given a description that matches the stereotype of an engineer, they often overlook the fact that there are more lawyers than engineers in the population. This leads them to overestimate the likelihood that the person is an engineer simply based on the representativeness of the description. The representativeness heuristic can also lead to faulty judgments when people ignore the law of large numbers. People tend to believe that a small sample resembles the population from which it is drawn, even when the sample size is too small to be representative. This can result in overconfidence in the accuracy of judgments based on limited information. Furthermore, the representativeness heuristic can lead to faulty judgments when people fail to consider the base rate of an event. Instead of starting with the overall probability of an event occurring, people often focus on specific details that make the event seem more likely. This can result in errors in judgment because the base rate is not taken into account.- The representativeness heuristic can lead to faulty judgments because it relies on stereotypes and prototypes rather than considering all relevant information. By understanding the limitations of this heuristic, people can make more accurate judgments by taking into account base rates, sample sizes, and other relevant information before making a decision.
