Representativeness Heuristic
The ability of the human brain to store, retrieve, and evaluate information is a notable strength that facilitates decision-making and differentiates the sapiens species from other animals. Heuristics refer to the psychological shortcuts that individuals use to make quick choices or judgements about a scenario. While such techniques are helpful in a highly dynamic environment, they expose people to multiple cognitive biases that could lead to suboptimal decisions. The representativeness heuristic is the tendency to ignore fundamental statistics about a phenomenon and, instead, creating new definitions based on perceived similarities to a specific category (Pope 1). In this view, people disregard mathematical probabilities and rely on their imagination of resemblance to make decisions. For instance, one can make judgements about other people’s careers based on the congruence of their conduct to established stereotypes about specific group behaviors, independent of provided probabilities. A notable bias resulting from this heuristic is the misconstruction of regression, which emphasizes the repetition of extreme outcomes subsequently (Alkhars, Evangelopoulos, Pavur, & Kulkarni 2019). However, changes in internal and external factors generally provide room for variations and, hence, the perspective is erroneous.
The representativeness heuristic can have significant effects in my personal life. One of the emphasized aspects of career development is gaining the right employer-fit. However, such elements as brand popularity and organizational profitability often overshadow important considerations as culture, which defines employee treatment, ethics, and stakeholder relations among other relevant aspects. The representativeness heuristic can influence my judgement in the future to ignore adverse, yet critical, company statistics in favor of prototypes deemed to represent “big” and “ideal” employers. For instance, I might be subjective in thinking all Fortune 500 companies generally offer model employment terms and opportunities, despite the presence of data illustrating otherwise. Such an error can have profound negative effects on my professional progression.