Representativeness Heuristic

Recently, I celebrated a friend's birthday at a board games cafe called Mind Cafe. We decided to play a trivia game called, Smart Ass. The description of the game is as follows:-

Each Who, What and Where am I? card has ten clues, and the first player to yell out the correct answer moves one step closer to being the ultimate "Smart Ass." Move forward by correctly identifying people, places and things before any of the other players. The first player to reach the target in the center of the board wins. In addition, it is possible to pick a Hard Ass card, which usually asks a tough one sentenced question with no clues e.g. Which country has the highest export of gold?

Someone then picked a Hard Ass card and the question posed was "Which continent is Egypt in?" Almost immediately, Jeff* yelled "Asia!". The answer is Africa.

We then asked Jeff why he thought Egypt was in Asia, and he said "It's a Middle Eastern country right, and aren't they in Asia?" At this point, the above example seems to illustrate the representativeness heuristic, which is the tendency to judge the likelihood that a target belongs to a category based on how similar the target is to the typical features of the category. When Jeff thought of Egypt, he linked it with being a Middle Eastern country and then linked Middle Eastern countries with Asia, and ultimately thought of Egypt as being in Asia.

(Note that while most Middle Eastern countries are in Asia, there are a few in Africa such as Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Morocco, Sudan & Tunisia.)

While the heuristic does allow us to come to pretty decent conclusions most of the time, problems can arise when people tend to make their judgements without using other available information. Referring back to the example, Billy* tells Jeff "Eh, didn't you watch Egypt vs. Cameroon in the African Cup of Nations soccer match? Would Egypt be playing if it wasn't a AFRICAN nation?" At this point Jeff goes "DOH!".

The tendency to use mental shortcuts is evident in everyday life. The illustrated examples show that while heuristics are useful for us to make decisions, it can sometimes be misleading. While this may not be as crucial in the Egypt example, think about the times we have used the representativeness heuristic in classifying people. I think that stereotypes (as mentioned in my first blog post) can be thought of as a type of representativeness heuristic. We tend to pay more attention to expectations and tend to disregard other information, thus leading to biases and errors in our thinking.