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<h1 id="post-title">The Representativeness Heuristic</h1>
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<h1 id="base-rate-neglect-and-english-fluency">Base-rate neglect and English fluency</h1>
<p>I often hear Indians speak in fluent English (with an American accent) and I assume that they must be really smart people. For some reason, that makes me feel insecure, but that’s another story.</p>
<p>Why do I think they must be smart? I imagine that really smart people are highly likely to speak fluent English. So, when I see people who speak fluent English, I think they must be really smart people.</p>
<p>Wrong answer! I just fell for the <a href>representativeness heuristic</a>. This says that, to decide whether an object belongs to some class, we will just look at how <em>similar</em> it is to this class.</p>
<p>Specifically, I fell for base-rate neglect here. I failed to realize that although smart people may speak fluent English, there are a lot of non-smart people in the world and even if some small fraction speaks fluent English, that would swamp out the previous effect. To illustrate, assume that 1% of people are “really smart” according to me - so, around 1,000 in a population of 100,000.</p>
<p>Further, assume that 100% of all smart people speak fluent English (unlikely, and unfair to those from non-English backgrounds, but still) - so, around 1,000 smart and fluent speakers. Next, let’s say just 5% of “non-smart” people speak English fluently - maybe by paying attention to American movies and sitcoms, or by just talking a lot and trying to impress each other instead of having their nose in a book all the time. I’m caricaturing them unfairly, but that gives us 5,000 non-smart but fluent speakers. So, you have 1,000 smart, fluent speakers and 5,000 non-smart, fluent speakers - a total of 6,000 fluent speakers.</p>
<p>Now, given that you see someone speak fluently, how likely are they to be a smart person? Well, it’s 1,000 out of 6,000 - a chance of around 17% percent. It’s five times as likely that it’s a non-smart person. And remember, I assumed that all smart people speak fluent English, which is not the case. Plus, I only assumed that around 5% of non-smart people speak fluently, which is probably an underestimate, given how American influences are spreading in India, and how social norms are changing to reward sounding fluent in English.</p>
<p>So, the next time I see some fluent speaker and start feeling insecure, I need to remember to factor in the base rate of non-smart people. Phew.</p>
<h1 id="notes">Notes</h1>
<p>Note that I don’t understand precisely when we will make this mistake. I need to study the original papers more to get that level of understanding.</p>
<div class="info">Created: September 19, 2015</div>
<div class="info">Last modified: February 20, 2017</div>
<div class="info">Status: in-progress</div>
<div class="info"><b>Tags</b>: representativeness heuristic, heuristics and biases</div>
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