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Psychology / Unit 7   Psych 0785 short lesson, about 20 seconds

The Representativeness Heuristic

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The idea

The representativeness heuristic judges the likelihood that something belongs to a category by how much it resembles the category's prototype.

In practice

A quiet, orderly person is judged more likely to be a librarian than a salesperson, despite far more salespeople.

Where people slip

Resemblance ignores base rates. The size of the categories is the information being discarded.

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