original judgment.” For example, the anchoring heuristic plays an important role in initial impressions. Once the initial impression is formed, it proves to be very difficult to change( ). A second type of judgment bias is the representativeness heuristic. This heuristic is a way of making judgments based on the extent to which current stimuli or events resemble other stimuli or categories. For example, the more similar an individual is to typical members of a given group, the more likely she or he is to belong to that group. In __________ descriptions of the study by Tversky and Kahneman, participants encountered a man who was orderly, small in build, wore glasses, spoke quietly, and seemed somewhat shy. When participants were asked whether this person was likely to be a librarian or a farmer, most chose librarian. Although the description of the man more closely resembles a prototypical librarian, chances are that this conclusion is false. Because there are more farmers than librarians, more farmers would match this description than librarians ( ). However, because of the representativeness heuristic, people tend to ignore the overall probabilities and focus instead on what is representative of the presented evidence.A third judgment bias described by Tversky and Kahneman is the availability heuristic which states that the easier certain information is brought to mind, the greater its importance or relevance to people’s judgments or decisions. The more information a person can bring to mind, the greater it impacts his or her judgment. The focus of this heuristic is the ease with which a person can bring information to mind and the amount of information one can bring to mind. For example, if someone were asked if more people were killed by fires or by drowning, most would respond with “fires.” However, this response would not be accurate. More people actually die from drowning than fires. Because...
