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Exemplars in the mist: The cognitive substrate of the representativeness heuristic
Author(s) -
NILSSON HÅKAN,
JUSLIN PETER,
OLSSON HENRIK
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
scandinavian journal of psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.743
H-Index - 72
eISSN - 1467-9450
pISSN - 0036-5564
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9450.2008.00646.x
Subject(s) - representativeness heuristic , psychology , normative , heuristic , cognitive psychology , heuristics , task (project management) , cognition , social psychology , artificial intelligence , computer science , epistemology , philosophy , management , neuroscience , economics , operating system
The idea that people often make probability judgments by a heuristic short‐cut, the representativeness heuristic , has been widely influential, but also criticized for being vague. The empirical trademark of the heuristic is characteristic deviations between normative probabilities and judgments (e.g., the conjunction fallacy, base‐rate neglect). In this article the authors contrast two hypotheses concerning the cognitive substrate of the representativeness heuristic, the prototype hypothesis (Kahneman & Frederick, 2002) and the exemplar hypothesis (Juslin & Persson, 2002), in a task especially designed to elicit representativeness effects. Computational modelling and an experiment reveal that representativeness effects are evident early in training and persist longer in a more complex task environment and that the data are best accounted for by a model implementing the exemplar hypothesis.