Representativeness Heuristic

What is the representativeness heuristic?

The representativeness heuristic uses similarity to judge likelihood: an outcome seems more probable when it resembles a category or generating process.

Tversky and Kahneman’s original account describes occupation judgments in which a personality sketch fit a professional stereotype. Similarity can be useful evidence, but it does not itself account for how common each occupation is or how reliable the description is.

Representativeness and stereotyping

A stereotype supplies a picture of a category, such as a typical profession. The representativeness heuristic uses resemblance to make a likelihood judgment. Occupational stereotyping can therefore feature in a representativeness judgment, but the heuristic is broader: it also concerns resemblance to events and processes.

Representativeness heuristic example

For example, a description may resemble a librarian stereotype even when librarians are uncommon in the relevant population. The base rate is how common an occupation is in that population. This illustrates the distinction between resemblance and probability.