Article
Psychological Review

Memory and Representativeness

By: Pedro Bordalo, Katherine Baldiga Coffman, Nicola Gennaioli, Frederik Schwerter and Andrei Shleifer

Format:Print

Abstract

We explore the idea that judgment by representativeness reflects the workings of episodic memory, especially interference. In a new laboratory experiment on cued recall, participants are shown two groups of images with different distributions of colors. We find that i) decreasing the frequency of a given color in one group significantly increases the recalled frequency of that color in the other group and ii) for a fixed set of images, different cues for the same objective distribution entail different interference patterns and different probabilistic assessments. Selective retrieval and interference may offer a foundation for the representativeness heuristic, but more generally for understanding the formation of probability judgments from experienced statistical associations.

Keywords

Cued Recall; Interference; Similarity; Probabilistic Judgments; Heuristics And Biases

Citation

Bordalo, Pedro, Katherine Baldiga Coffman, Nicola Gennaioli, Frederik Schwerter, and Andrei Shleifer. "Memory and Representativeness." Psychological Review 128, no. 1 (January 2021): 71–85.