Induction – Typically described as a process in which you go beyond the information given – drawing inferences about a pattern, based on a few examples, or making projections about novel cases, based on what you’ve seen so far. Inducted conclusions are never guaranteed to be true. Nonetheless, if inductions are done properly, the conclusions are likely to be true.
Thus, we want to compare a descriptive amount of human induction, telling us how the process ordinarily proceeds, with a normative account, telling us how things ought to go. In this way, we would be able to ask whether our day-to0day judgements are foolish or sensible, and whether our common-sense conclusions are justified or not.
Attribute Substitution: If judgements often depend on remembered evidence, is there anything you can do to help yourself, so that memory problems are less likely to pull you off track?
One option is Attribute Substitution: you can use this strategy when you are trying to evaluate some point but do not have easy access to the target information. You therefore rely on some other aspect of experience that is more accessible and that is a plausible substitute for the information you seek.
Frequencies: Assessments of how various events have happened in the past.
Availability Heuristic: Relying on availability – the ease with which things come to mind – as an index for frequency. Tversky and Kahneman (1973) referred to this substitution – the reliance of availability as a substitute for frequency – as the Availability Heuristic.
Anchoring: In many situations, we do not know the answer to a specific question but we have an idea about what ballpark the idea is in. What we can therefore do is use that idea as an initial “anchor” and then reach our answer by making some suitable adjustment to that anchor. The problem, though, is that we usually adjust too little, and we are more influenced by the initial anchor than we should be.
In addition, anchoring has another consequence: When judgement errors arise for other reasons, anchoring serves to cement them in