Psychology, Science & Pseudoscience - Essay Example

Download file to see previous pages By assuming thus, one strikes at the area of fallacy—to assume that similarity in one aspect leads to the similarity of other aspects as well. “The gambler’s fallacy, the belief in runs of good and bad luck can be explained by the representativeness heuristic. People will also ‘force’ statistical arrangements to represent their beliefs about them, for example, a set of random numbers will be carefully mixed up so no similar numbers are near one another.” (Representativeness…) When people make the assumption that a small sample is representative of a much larger population, the law of small number applies. For example, if someone with small eyes and short stature, one assumes that they are Chinese. The one with a good height and long nose and fair complexion you may assume that they are from Iran. While buying a lottery ticket, one thinks about the random sequence or particular sequence of numbers than an arithmetical sequence of numbers.
Heuristic does not mean that you rely on statistics only. Statistics may not be of any use at all in many assumptions. For example, if we come across some dynamic sales personnel from a company, we presume that the company is following an aggressive marketing policy. A few brilliant personnel in the sales department lead to the assumption about the work culture of the company as a whole. It can be partly true or may be totally fallacious. “Many of the probabilistic questions with which people are concerned to belong to one of the following types: What is the probability that objects A belongs to class B? What is the probability that event A originate from process B? What is the probability that process B will generate event A? ...Download file to see next pagesRead More