Representative Heuristic of Decision Making

After discussing decision making in class I found that the representative heuristic was one that could be the most deceiving. Basing ones decision off of the stereotypes of similar occurrences I feel is a more naive instinct. Even in class we were able to consider many biases involving the representative heuristic. There are so many ways that an occurrence or decision outcome could change, that I feel the representative heuristic falls short of the other two. Misconception of chance and the independence of multiple random events I feel is the most common bias within this heuristic. You always hear of people being addicted to gambling, for example and how many of these individuals become deep in debt. I think this is also where the saying "quit while you are still ahead" comes in to play. Just because you made out good under one circumstance, does not mean that the next time you can expect the exact same result.

I feel that in making a decision, the representative heuristic should be looked at as a last resort to the availability and anchoring/adjustment heuristics. Have an actual probability for basing your decision off is in my opinion the better more frequent way for making decisions. The anchoring and adjustment heuristic was probably one that I was least familiar with but this also seems like a good way to make a decision. The example with guessing the lollipops in a jar, and how all the guesses average out to about the right answer was sort of hard to wrap your head around. But if this is almost always true, I think it would be neat to experiment with this.