Memory and Representativeness

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

No 25692, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

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, 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.

JEL-codes: D03 D81 D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-ict
Note: TWP
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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