Representative Heuristic

Cognitive Tool Box

A collection of fundamental, automatic cognitive abilities that help us judge similarities, recognize patterns, retrieve information, and understand causal relationships.

Availability Heuristic

A cognitive shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to mind when evaluating a specific topic, concept, method, or decision.

Representativeness Heuristic

A cognitive bias in which people evaluate probabilities based on how much one event resembles another event.

Conjunction Fallacy

The error of judging the conjunction of two events to be more probable than either event alone.

Probability of Conjunction

The probability of two events occurring together (P(A∩B)) cannot exceed the probability of either event occurring individually (P(A) or P(B)).

Base Rates

The underlying likelihood of a specific event or outcome based on prior knowledge before new information is considered.

Insensitivity to Prior Probabilities

A cognitive bias where individuals fail to consider the base rates of outcomes when making judgments.

Misconception of Chance

The false belief that random events should produce representative patterns, leading to incorrect judgments about probability.

Representativeness

The assessment of the correspondence degree between a sample and a population, used in decision-making and probability evaluation.

Error in Assessing Conjunction Probabilities

Individuals often perceive lower probability events as more likely than they statistically are due to representativeness heuristic.