Question

If I tell you that John is 24, is outgoing, loves the snow, is very athletic, and strong, and you immediately think that John is a snowboard instructor who likes to hike instead of him just being a snowboard instructor or just a hiker, what kind of error have you committed? Define or explain what this error means in terms of probability.

Answer 1

Reprsentative Heuristic

As, here a quick judgement is being made depending on mental prototype.

Under reprsentative heuristic we tend to overvalue the explainations based on personality and undervalue the situtional explainations for action of others

When people depend on representativeness for making judgments, they are more likely to judge wrongly because the fact that if something is more representative that does not actually make it more likely. The representativeness heuristic is simply described as assessing similarity of objects and organizing them based around the category prototype (e.g. causes and effects should resemble each other).  The problem is that people overestimate its ability to accurately predict the likelihood of an event.Thus, it can result in  cognitive biases.