How the representativeness and availability heuristic contribute to the formation and persistence of stereotypes.
A Psychology Topic
Representativeness Heuristic
To better illustrate the representativeness heuristic, I will divide it up between three “branches,” even though it’s not really a concept that needs to be divided. However, to have the writing be more organized, I thought that this format would be a better idea. Therefore, the three “branches” of the representativeness heuristic are: “Small-sample fallacy,” “base-rate fallacy,” and the “conjunction fallacy.”
The small-sample fallacy is when we assume that a small sample size is a good-enough representation of a whole population. For example, we commit a small-sample fallacy when we believe that an entire population of 1,000 people will act in the same way that the 5 individuals we saw the other day behaved.
I remember a person that I saw exemplify this fallacy. When I was in middle school, there was a student who was known to be racist towards Hispanics. One time, from hearsay, I heard that he had a heavy dislike for all Hispanics because he was once taunted for his weight by two Hispanic kids. For this reason, he never spoke to Hispanics, and if he did, he did it with disdain. Therefore, he never talked to my friend because he thought that he, being part of the Hispanic population, would act in the same way as the small sample size he interacted with previously. However, without getting to know anybody else other than the two students who were mean to him, how would he ever find out that not everyone behaves the same as that extremely small sample size?
The same can be applied to food: just because I ate a distasteful burger at a restaurant from a fast-food chain, doesn’t mean that all burgers, in all of the restaurants from that chain, will taste the same as the one burger I ate. If I avoid all fast-food restaurants from that company, how would I ever find this out? Therefore, stereotypes that stem from the small-sample fallacy persist because of people’s avoidance for the people or thing in question. Avoidance only makes our minds more narrow.
The representativeness heuristic usually brings us to the correct answer, however, it can also lead us astray to terrible outcomes. Before explicitly defining what the base-rate fallacy is, I would like to give an example:
In a time period where many restaurants are still not accustomed to install cameras at all, imagine that there is a cashier working in a restaurant that is close to both a predominantly White neighborhood and another neighborhood that is made up of many migrants from different countries. One day, an unexpected situation occurs. During a mid-week day, a man with a black mask and a black jacket enters the restaurant while the cook is out throwing the trash in the dumpster outside of the building and the cashier has her face turned away from the entrance. No other employees are working that day. The thief silently comes up to the cashier as she is washing the counter. He points the weapon he is holding to her head and tells her to not turn around. In a rushed and aggressive voice, the thief orders the cashier to take the bag he is carrying and to put the money found in the cash register in it. In the moment that the thief spoke, the cashier heard the voice of the thief as sounding similar to a recurrent client’s voice, but she could not specifically say who’s. The thief orders her not to turn around nor to look at him. The cashier does as she is told, and before she feels the hands of time pass by, she hears the sound of the front doors close after the sound of hurried footsteps are heard. After the thief has left, and after the police, who were later called, arrive, the cashier tells the police officers that she thinks that the thief was “a migrant” because she could tell from his voice that he spoke English as a second language.
Now, although the restaurant is close to two distinct neighborhoods, the restaurant primarily serves clients who are from the White neighborhood. If we were to observe 100 clients that purchase food in one mid-week day like the day in which the theft occurred, we would notice that 85 of the clients would be White and 15 would be migrants. Therefore, out of 100 clients, 85% of the clients would be White and 15% of the clients would be migrants.
Somewhat aware of this, the police officers decide to have the cashier participate in a special trial. In this trial, the cashier is instructed to listen to the rushed voices of people as they say different phrases. She is instructed to differentiate between the speakers who she assumes speak English as a first language and those who speak English as a second language. The cashier ends up correctly labelling each speaker 80% of the time. In other words, she could guess who spoke English as their first or second language 80% of the time. Looking at these results, the police officers come to the conclusion that the cashier’s initial assumption is likely to be correct, and they go on to arrest a migrant who was passing by the restaurant around the same time the theft occurred and who was wearing a black jacket as well.
Nonetheless, this final situation would be a tragic base-rate fallacy. If the cashier saw 100 clients, of which 85 were White and 15 were migrants, in a mid-week day, and if the cashier was right 80% of the time in the trial she did, this would mean that, going by probability, she could have correctly identified 68 White clients, but misidentify 17, while correctly identifying 12 clients who were migrants, but misidentifying 3.
Now, remember that the cashier had guessed that the thief was a migrant. Therefore, the cashier could have correctly identified one of the 12 migrant clients, or she could have misidentified the thief by claiming he was a “migrant client,” when in reality he was one of the 17 White clients who had an accent that made him be perceived from the cashier’s perspective as not speaking English as a first language.
As for the police officers who had believed the cashier, they had committed a tragic base-rate fallacy. The police officers had forgotten about the more broad set of statistics, in which it demonstrated that, out of 100 clients, 85 of them could have been “White” clients, while only 15 could have been “migrant clients.” They had focused on the 80% that the cashier got during her trial and had forgotten about the overall statistic, which demonstrated that, logically, since more than half of the clients who enter the restaurant in a mid-week day could be White, then it is likely that the thief was one of the White clients.
Overall, we commit the base-rate fallacy when we forget about the overall probability of an event, and instead focus all of our attention on a new and small probability. This fallacy persists when the person committing this fallacy does not consider all of the information relating to the problem at hand. One needs only to move the gaze or to recompile all relevant information so to not miss any number or probability. Like a math equation, we cannot forget any number, for if we do, we would surely arrive at the wrong answer.
Finally, the last “branch” of the representativeness heuristic is the conjunction fallacy. The conjunction fallacy occurs when we come to wrongly believe that events, or descriptions, such as “A” and “B,” occur more times when they are combined, than if they were apart by themselves. An example of this fallacy can be the following: Henrikh did not go to college and lives in the rural area of a state that favors conservative politics. Which would be more likely: Henrikh is a cook; or Henrikh is a cook who is active in conservative politics? People who commit the conjunction fallacy would choose the latter, thinking that there is a higher probability of Henrikh being a cook and being active in conservative politics at the same time. However, when describing Henrikh, there was no mention of his political affiliation, only that he lives in a state that favors conservative politics. Even more, what is more probable is not the combination of the descriptions of “cook” and “active in conservative politics,” what is more probable is the description of “cook” if it is by itself or the description of “active in conservative politics” if it is by itself.
How can the conjunction fallacy contribute to the creation of stereotypes and help in their persistence? To commit a conjunction fallacy is to think that, if someone is A, then he must be B, or C, or D, or E. When in reality, if someone is A, then what is more probable is that that person is just A. This fallacy keeps occurring if the person committing the fallacy does not think deeply about where his or her mind automatically goes. If this person were to engage with type 2 processing, in which he or she were to think while being more consciously aware, he or she would notice that one event or description by itself is more probable of being true than that description or event combined with another description or event. In summary, the representativeness heuristic can involve any of the previously stated examples.
Availability Heuristic
The availability heuristic occurs when we correlate the frequency of something with how easy, or how difficult, the task of retrieving a memory of that something is (Matlin & Farmer, 463). “If the problem requires you to remember examples, you are dealing with the availability heuristic” (Matlin & Farmer, 463). I believe, like I did when writing about the representativeness heuristic, that it would be better to describe the availability heuristic as 4 different “branches.” These 4 “branches” are: “Recency," “Familiarity," “the Recognition Heuristic,” and "the Illusory Correlation.”
The recency “branch” is the action of thinking that a recent event occurs and will continue to occur on a frequent basis.
To exemplify this, imagine an individual who regularly watches the national news at 8:00pm. Suddenly, sparked by the arguments of several politicians, immigration becomes the primary news. During a whole week, anti-immigration arguments are being shown on the national news. Day after day, the individual sees statistics and examples that convey how crime has gone up because of immigrants, and how each immigrant might be a future murderer or rapist who “might end up in your neighborhood without you knowing it.” Later on, you encounter this individual and he starts telling you how much crime is being committed nowadays “by those immigrants.” You counter-argue by saying that there hasn’t been much change in the amount of crime. The individual scoffs at you and tells you that that can’t be true, “because if you listen to the news, you would realize that more immigrant-caused crime is being reported now than ever before!”
If the news channel that the individual watches continues to focus its attention around anti-immigrant perspectives, and if the individual does not look for different perspectives, the individual would only keep confirming his perception and become more hardened atop his position. Continued repetition of a task, such as listening to the same channel of information, makes stereotypes persist.
The second “branch” is that of familiarity. An example of familiarity can also include the presence of the media. Once, I was on a site in which politics is discussed. Many of the comments shared my same specific point of view towards many topics, so I gravitated towards that online space. I started spending most of the time on that website, informing myself about how the “country” was feeling towards the topic of the day. Before the elections, I had in mind that my view would be popular in the voting results because “many people are talking and agreeing with it.” However, when the elections passed by, I found out that my point of view was not at all popular with the general public. I had encapsulated myself in an echo-chamber and had expected that what had become familiar would also be prevalent throughout the majority of the country. To think of something being prevalent only because it is familiar can be something dangerous. Familiarity, or an echo-chamber that reinforces stereotypes, can lead to the persistence of those stereotypes. It is important to not think of something familiar as being popular, because by doing that, we will have a more “objective” view of the state of the society in which we live in. It is important to not believe that our little echo-chambers are actual reflections of how common our own beliefs are in the real world.
The recognition heuristic is somewhat related to the familiarity “branch.” The recognition heuristic is basically this: what you recognize more quickly is what you think occurs frequently. For example, imagine that city A is known to have several shootings occur in its streets throughout the year. These occurrences are consistently covered in the media, to the point where many individuals relate that city with these acts of violence. On the other hand, city B, which is a much smaller city located a bit further ahead of city A, is not known by many people outside of its city limits. Although city B experiences shootings as often, or perhaps even more, as city A, it is not covered in the media to the same extent as city A.
When wanting to drive to the city ahead of city A and city B, city C, you worry about stopping at city A. You worry so much that, even though you might need to stop at city A to pump gas into your car, you decide instead to risk your travel and see if you can drive until you reach city B, “a safer city,” to stop at a gas station.
Although you might have crossed a news section that spoke about the violence that occurs in city B, because you recognize city A quicker than city B, you think that the violence that happens in city A occurs on a more frequent basis than that which occurs in city B. What you recognize is what you think there is more of and what you do not recognize is what you think there is less of. Therefore, you can come to believe that a certain area has more violence, more poverty, more negative characteristics than another area, when the other area might have more of those negative characteristics than the former.
The final “branch” of the availability heuristic is the illusory correlation. One commits an illusory correlation when one believes that two variables are related when there is no proof of such relation actually existing. Some of the stereotypes that can be included under the illusory correlation are:
1.) “Almost all immigrants are ‘bringing crime; they’re rapists’ (as immigration increases crime increases),”
2.) “Certain races of people are not successful because they simply don’t want to (some races are ‘naturally’ related to poverty),” and
3.) “Women stay in violent relationships because they simply want to (the rate of in-couple violence is due to the willingness of female partners to remain in such a relationship).”
The just-stated examples are false because the statistics demonstrate that the two variables are not related nor correlated. Unfortunately, in an illusory correlation, people pay more attention to the chunk of information that confirms their hypothesis, than the other chunk of information that goes against their hypothesis. Therefore, although the overall information might be available, the people only want to read and listen to what confirms their biases, and so it is very hard to have them dismiss their stereotypes and not have those stereotypes persist. It is important to hear more than one, more than two voices, for if we don’t, we would just be living in an echo-chamber. It is also important to be aware that not everything has to be related. There are many unfamiliar factors that might affect one variable and many variables that might not even be related to each other. In summary, the availability heuristic can involve any of the previously stated examples.
References:
Deciderata. [Jul 25, 2016]. Know Your Bias: Base Rate Neglect. Retrieved from
Matlin, Margaret W.; Farmer, Thomas A.. (2016). Cognition: 9th Edition. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 445-491.
TED-Ed. [Nov 25, 2019]. Can you outsmart this logical fallacy? - Alex Gendler. Retrieved from