How does “Representativeness Heuristic” work?

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How does “Representativeness Heuristic” work?

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Heuristics are mental shortcuts that help us judge things in a way that is efficient in terms of cognitive demand (i.e. effort to think about) but that are also based on assumptions about probability that may not always work out to make the heuristic factually correct.

Representativeness is a heuristic in which we take a shortcut to judging the likelihood of something when we are not certain about the judgment. For example, imagine that you have only ever seen the color blue on cube-shaped objects. You form a shortcut that says “all blue things are cube shaped objects.” You then briefly glimpse a blue thing – say, a bird – but you do not see clearly whether it is a cube-shaped object or not before it leaves your field of vision. You have the prior belief that all blue things are cube-shaped, so you might use your heuristic to decide that the bird must have been cube-shaped. You might be wrong, but it is much faster and easier than trying to sit down and decide deliberately on the shape of that blue thing.

In the real world, heuristics can be quite complicated in and of themselves. You might observe some class of objects that is very broad, and make heuristic-based assumptions about superficially similar objects that do not necessarily belong to that class. This is useful if you encounter new information that you need to evaluate quickly, and if your heuristic is sufficiently correct to be right on average.