The representativeness heuristic can be repurposed as a covert measure of implicit group stereotypes

Evidence

Most participants given this question choose option 2. However, the second option is necessarily less probable than the first. This problem works only because, at an intuitive level, the description of Linda just sounds like a description of an active feminist. This is termed the representativeness heuristic—judging the probability of events based on perceived representativeness to a description, rather than based on consideration of probabilities. Crucially, this effect works only if the description of the target (liberal and focused on issues of discrimination) matches the potential group membership of the target (feminist). If option 2 instead read “Linda is a bank teller and is an active supporter of tax cuts for the wealthy and looser gun control laws,” there would be considerably less intuitive pull to select option 2. … Next, participants chose whether it is more probable that Richard is (1) a teacher or (2) a teacher who is also an atheist. In this task, the proportion of participants who succumbed to the intuitive pull of the second option provides an indirect and subtle measure of stereotyping of atheists as criminally untrustworthy. For other participants, atheist was replaced with another comparison group, such as gay, feminist, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and so on. The question was, would believers make more logical errors when a criminally untrustworthy individual was paired with atheist than with other comparison groups? — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 273

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the representativeness heuristic (Tversky & Kahneman) and shows its mechanism — representativeness to a description rather than probability calculation.
• SEED: The covert stereotype-measurement technique is a strong methodological angle for an essay on how societies measure prejudice against invisible or distrusted groups like atheists.
• XREF: connects to: The implicit association test measures bias via response latency on concept-sorting tasks. — Wade C. Rowatt and Lewis M. Franklin, Christian Orthodoxy, Religious…, 25; Measuring stereotypes indirectly reveals prejudice explicit surveys miss — Anthony G. Greenwald and Mahzarin R. Banaji, Implicit Social Cognition: Attitudes,…, 194; The fame-judgment paradigm can be adapted to detect implicit gender stereotypes. — Anthony G. Greenwald and Mahzarin R. Banaji, Implicit Social Cognition: Attitudes,…, 209