Demonstrations
Heuristics and Biases
1. Overconfidence. Provide a low guess and a high guess such that you are 90% confident the correct answer falls between the two. On this demonstration people who got more than 5 items wrong were overconfident. Do Harvard MBAs, physicians, physicists, and computer company managers commit the overconfidence error?
2. The representativeness heuristic sometimes deceives people into ignoring base rate information. Information about Melissa was vivid, concrete, and easily usable. How often are you and I misled by media information which is vivid, concrete, and easily usable?
3. Availability heuristic. For example, in random English text, which words are more likely? Those beginning with the letter k or those with k as the third letter? (Wade and Tavris, pages 322-323)