Heuristics and Biases

Representativeness Heuristic

Assume Likelihood specific occurrence is related to likelihood of similar occurrences

Availability Heuristic

Most available information is representative of the larger pool of possible events

Confirmation Heuristic

tendency to make judgments by confirming prior information rather than seeking to find evidence against it

retrievability

under availability heuristic: bias in assessment of frequency of events based on how their memory structures affect the search process (n as sixth letter verses ending in ing)

Ease of Recall

under availability heuristic: judge events that are more easily recalled from memory based on vividness or recency to be more numerous than events of equal frequency which are less recalled (familiarity with names)

Hindsight and the curse of knowledge

under confirmation heuristic, after finding out whether or not an event occurred, individuals tend to overestimate the degree to which they would have predicted the correct outcome. fail to ignore information they possess that others do not when predicting other's behaviors

Anchoring

under confirmation heuristic, estimates values based upon an initial value (derived from past events, random assignments, or whatever info is available) and typically make insufficient adjustments from that anchor

Conjunctive and disjunctive event bias

under confirmation heuristic, exhibit a bias towards overestimating the probability of conjunctive events and underestimating probability of disjunctive events

Confirmation trap

under confirmation heuristic, seek confirmatory information for what they think is true and fail to search for disconfirmatory evidence

Overconfidence

under confirmation heuristic, tend to be overconfident of the correctness of their judgment, especially when answering difficult questions

Insensitivity to base rates

under representativeness heuristic, assessing likelihood of events, individual tend to ignore base rates if any other descriptive info available

Misconceptions of chance

under representativeness heuristic, individuals expect that a sequence of data generated by random process will look random even when sequences is too short for those expectations to be statistically valid

insensitivity to sample size

under representativeness heuristic, when assessing reliability, fail to appreciate the role of sample size

Regression to the mean

under representativeness heuristic,Individuals tend to ignore the fact that extreme events tend to regress to the mean on subsequent trials

Conjunction fallacy

under representativeness heuristic,individuals judge that conjunction (two events occurring) are more probable than a more global set of occurrences of which the conjunction is a subset