PSYC 336 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Representativeness Heuristic

• School: University of San Diego
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 336
• Professor: Appleton-Knapp

Document Summary

Many of the categories you encounter are relatively homogeneous. We expect each individual to resemble the other individuals in the category. We can use resemblance as a basis for judging the likelihood of category membership. Use of the representativeness heuristic can lead to error. The reasoning that a coin is fair, then any series of tosses should contain roughly equal numbers of heads and tail. 6 heads assume that the next should be tails. The likelihood of a tail occurring on any particular toss must be independent of what happened on previous tosses. No way that the previous tosses could possibly influence the next one. Produced by the assumption of category homogeneity. Our assumption of homogeneity leads us to expect that any representative of the category will also have this property. Reasoning from a single case to the entire population. They have force only by virtue of the representativeness heuristic and your assumption of category homogeneity.