Representativeness and Availability Heuristics

Chapter 3


4 – What do think are the advantages and disadvantages of using heuristics like representativeness and availability?

Heuristics as a term means a method that help solve problems. Representativeness heuristics was first conned by Kahneman and Tversky while they were conducting research on judgment. Heuristics are recognised for their fast conclusion to a decision and representativeness heuristic is very useful for everyday decision making. However, the use of representativeness heuristics as any heuristics can lead to errors and neglect of other cognitive tasks. According to Kahneman and Tversky representativeness heuristics can lead to biases by believe that causes and effects will resemble one and other.

Although, it effectiveness representativeness heuristics can violate of the fundamental properties of probabilities such as, extensionality. Let’s for example take the problem proposed by Kahneman and Tversky about LINDA, who according to the characteristics resemble a feminist. The participants were asked to evaluate the probabilities of LINDA been a bank teller, feminist or probability of her being both bank teller and feminist. According to the probability theory the probability of her being both bank teller and feminist is must been less or equal to her being feminist or bank teller. However, the participant’s judgments were that she must have been bank teller and feminist.

Apart from the violation of extensionality, representativeness heuristics also violates base-rate and conjunction fallacy and also the use of representativeness heuristics may also lead to disjunction fallacy. Probability theory tells us that disjunction of two events is at least as likely as either of the events individually. Studies suggests that even though individuals are aware that statistical mode of reasoning is appropriate, they are often unable to correctly apply this intuition and instead they use the representativeness heuristics (Hardman, 2009)



Availability Heuristics

According to Tversky (1982), availability is an ecologically valid clue for the judgment of frequency this is because in general, frequent events are easier to recall or imagine than infrequent ones (cited in Kahneman et al 1982, p. 164). Availability heuristics suggests that we use the knowledge that is readily available rather than looking at other alternatives. When it comes to availability heuristics as studies suggested imagining a situation has better results than asked to think of specific situation. However, the overreliance on availability heuristics can lead to biases such as irretrievability of instances, the effectiveness of search set and also illusory correlation. One can argue that perceived causes of imagined events that was mentioned by Tversky (1982) might have impact on probability estimates.


Conclusion, on one hand, when individuals use representativeness heuristics what they are doing in fact is changing a judgment of probability with the similarity. This however, moves from the typical answer suggested by the theory of probability. On the other hand, availability heuristics is more dependent on memory. Availability is associated with recency effect for recalls and also with familiarity to certain things and situations. Both representativeness and availability heuristics have their usefulness, however, to reduce error we should not rely on them as they might lead to errors.