Heuristics & Biases
This heuristic judges probability based on similarity, as in the Linda problem.
What is representativeness?
Bayes’ Rule combines prior probabilities with this ratio to update beliefs.
What is the likelihood ratio?
Wrongful convictions are most often linked to errors in this type of evidence.
What is eyewitness identification?
This phenomenon explains why people are less responsive to large-scale tragedies than to a single victim.
What is psychic numbing?
Michael Lewis’s Moneyball shows how this bias led scouts to overvalue appearance over performance.
What is the representativeness (or “good face”) bias?
Overestimating how long emotions last after major events is called this bias.
What is durability bias?
In signal detection, deciding an innocent person is a terrorist is this type of error.
What is a false positive (Type I error)?
Incorporating false external details into memory is called this effect.
What is the misinformation effect?
Social egalitarians are more likely to notice inequality when it harms this type of group.
What are disadvantaged groups?
Loftus & Palmer’s car crash study showed that changing "hit" to "smashed" when describing glass breaking influenced this.
What are speed estimates and false memories of broken glass?
People’s tendency to see bias in others but deny it in themselves is known as this.
What is the bias blind spot?
The O.J. Simpson case illustrates how this technique—choosing the right comparison group—changes conclusions.
What is partitioning?
Telling a witness “Good, you identified the suspect” can inflate this, even when they are wrong.
What is confidence?
According to Waldfogel et al., individuals high in social dominance orientation (SDO) are more tolerant of ____.
What is group-based hierarchy/inequality?
Gottman predicting divorce from brief interactions is an example of this type of rapid judgment.
What is thin-slicing?
Gilovich showed that people often rely too heavily on positive instances when forming beliefs, producing this kind of illusion.
What is the illusion of validity?
According to Hastie & Dawes, probabilities must obey four rules to be considered this.
What is coherent (rational)?
Presenting lineup photos one at a time rather than all at once is known as this format.
What is sequential lineup?
Slovic argues that statistical lives often fail to move us emotionally compared to this.
What is a singular, identified victim?
When repeated statements are judged as more truthful, this effect is at play.
What is the validity effect (or illusory truth effect)?
The phenomenon where vivid or recent events distort risk estimates is this heuristic.
What is the availability heuristic?
When decision criteria shift to avoid missing any “hits,” this error rate usually rises.
What is the false positive (Type I) rate?
A safeguard that prevents investigators from unintentionally influencing witnesses is this lineup procedure.
What is double-blind administration?
In change detection tasks, egalitarians were faster to notice changes involving these cues.
What are inequality-relevant cues (e.g., homelessness)?
Overconfidence in expertise despite poor accuracy is an example of this illusion.
What is the illusion of validity?