Question

The availability and representativeness heuristics are not useful and should be entirely avoided. Please select the best answer from the choices provided T F

Answer 1

False, these heuristics are not always applicable, but they are useful sometimes. For instance, the availability heuristic often pulls up recent information to mind rather than old information, but this may sometimes be true, particularly when talking about volatile issues which change rapidly. Similarly, the representativeness heuristic is often abused because the characteristics of a sample do not necessarily apply to the entire population, but sometimes, it is impractical to test the entire population, and the sample may be sufficiently large (as is studied in statistics). So these heuristics can be used, albeit with caution. But they should not be completely discarded.