Judgment Heuristic and Biases Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Judgment Heuristic and Biases - Essay Example These heuristics are very useful but at times can leads to severe and systematic errors. ( Harding,707 and Tversky, Kahneman,1124) In case of representative heuristics (Tversky and Kahneman, 1126), the likelihood of an event is judged based upon the extent to which it represents the essential features of the parent population or the generating process. Representative heuristic is generally used by people to make judgment or impression about someone or something. (Koning, 1) The relative frequency of an event often depends on the availability or accessability of the object or the event under perception memory or construction of imagination. This is availability heuristics. (Garns, 1) A bias is any of a wide range of observer effects identified in cognitive science and social psychology including very basic statistical, social attribution, and memory errors that are common to all human beings. Biases drastically skew the reliability of anecdotal and legal evidence. (Doughert and Franco-Watkins, 23) For example, the apparent distance of an object is determined in part by its clarity. The more sharply the object is seen, the closer it appears to be.