Question

Suppose you saw in a shopping mall a woman you had never seen before whose hair, nails, and clothing were black and who had several face and ear piercings and tattoos. You immediately figured that she was a tattoo artist, which is very rare, rather than a college student, which is much more common. What heuristic does this illustrate?

A. Representativeness
B. Availability
C. Mental accounting
D. Framing effects

Answer 1

A. Representativeness. The heuristic of representativeness involves making judgments about the likelihood of an event or object belonging to a certain category based on how closely it resembles or matches our mental prototype of that category. In this scenario, the woman's appearance closely matches the mental prototype of a tattoo artist, leading to the judgment that she is likely to be a tattoo artist.