Which concept involves judging the likelihood of events by how well they match a prototype, potentially leading to ignoring other information?

• A. Intuition
• B. Representativeness Heuristic
• C. Framing
• D. Functional Fixedness

Answer: (B)

This question is about a mental shortcut where we judge the likelihood of something by how closely it matches a typical example of a category, rather than by careful analysis of actual probabilities. Because we rely on a prototype, we can ignore base-rate information and other relevant data that would give a more accurate answer. For instance, if someone is described as quiet, bookish, and loving poetry, you might guess they’re a librarian because that fits a familiar librarian image, even though there are many more people in other professions. This tendency to rely on similarity to a stereotype to judge probability is the representativeness heuristic. It isn’t about how information is presented (framing), nor about a broad sense of quick, gut-level judgment (intuition) in general, and it isn’t about solving problems by using objects in their usual way (functional fixedness).