Internal Assesment- Heuristics: Tversky and Kahneman's

In psychology heuristics are described as simple and efficient rules. That have been coded by evolutionary processes or learned, which have been used to explain how people make decisions, make judgments, and how they solve problems, when facing problems or when they are presented with incomplete information. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman are two men who proposed the theory that when people are faced with the task of judging probability or frequency, people use a limited number of strategies, (heuristics) in order to simplify these judgments. They suggested that people judge likelihood of events based on how it 'represents' a larger group or similar examples this is now known as representativeness heuristic. They came to the conclusion that this his idea fits with accepted models of learning theory, especially the fact that we tend to categorize things in the memory and store things by association, therefore they are more likely to stereotype. In the another heuristic also know as availability heuristic They based on the idea that when asked to judge probability of an event, we base our judgment on how easy it is to think of relevant examples. In an experiment conducted to test this they presented participants with four lists of names: two lists containing 19 famous women and 20 less famous men, and two lists containing 19 famous men and 20 less famous women. The first group were asked to recall as many names as possible and the second group were asked to estimate which class was more frequent, either famous or less famous. The results were that first, the famous names were most easily recalled compared to the less famous names. Despite the fact that the less famous names were more frequent, the majority of the participants wrongly judged that the famous names appeared more often. Therefore an important factor that emerged from this study proved that the availability heuristic serves as an effective strategy in many situations. Although they lead to accurate judgments, they may also lead to systematic errors especially when it comes to judging frequency. For my experiment we will attempt to use the same idea used by the psychologists and hopefully obtain similar results. We will prepare a list that will each contain a set of names, these names may be either famous people, less famous people or just random names in two columns. Then the participant will be given a sheet of paper and a pencil and asked to recall and write down as many names as they are able to remember. Hopefully by conducting this experiment we will be able to further prove Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman theory.