Or if a robbery occurred and among the suspects was a black person, what is the likelihood of people accusing him of the offence. Very high, we would say. This is because of availability and stereotypical connection between people of minorities and crime. In this heuristic again, five kinds of errors or biases can emerge: 1. Some errors are purely theoretical in nature. The two events may not be as related to each other as were initially assumed. For example all Muslims with beard are not fanatic or extremists but there is a likelihood that these two would go together in a person's mind.

2. People with show insensitivity to previous results. They may fail to take into account prior probability outcomes and instead rely on their own judgment based on representative-ness.

3. No attention to the size of the group examined. In other words, people tend to foget about sample sizes. They feel that a result that was true for a group of 50 would also be true for a group of 500 and this can lead to errors in judgment.

4. Inability to understand the role of chance. Tversky and Kahneman maintain that, "people expect that a sequence of events generated by a random process will represent the essential characteristics of that process even when the sequence is short"

5. Misconceptions about regression and their role in the judgment process. People may often be so heavily influenced by representative-ness that they may forget law of regression completely. Hence people "do not expect regression in many contexts where it is bound to occur... (and) when they recognize the occurrence of regression, they often invent spurious causal explanations for it"

The third heuristic of anchoring comes into play when adjustment or estimates are being calculated. When a person is to depend on calculation of probabilities or assigning of the same, they may not...

This is called anchoring where people anchor their estimates to the starting point, which is always bigger to them than the latter. Interestingly the authors with the help of two sequences have illustrated this:
8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 or

1 x 2 x 3 x 4 x 5 x 6 x 7 x 8

They argue that when given separately, people are more likely to assume that the first one will produce a bigger result than the second one, though in this case, they are both equal. The authors found that in their tests, they learned that there was a wide gap between the probabilities of 'A' being higher in people's minds than B. The estimated answer for the first was 2250 while for the second it was merely 512. Thus we can say that if the first event or whatever were the starting point, was bigger and more dramatic, people are likely to stay closer to it then any minor event later on. This can be explained with the help of September 11 attacks. Since these attacks were dramatic and massive in magnitude, their impact on judgment would be greater than any efforts made by Muslim countries to counter terrorism. Thus in calculating the likelihood of a terrorist being a Muslim, people will stay closer to September 11 events than to efforts made later on.

These heuristics do play important roles but they cannot be considered the ultimate. There are many people who wouldn't resort to anchoring in order to reach a more objective result. The repeated messages rejecting anchoring may indeed push some people away from it and lean more towards the other extreme. For example though France lost major soccer final last year, what is the likelihood of people associating their adjustments with that one loss. Very low indeed. People are more likely to see the whole record and then reach an accurate judgment. We understand that heuristics…