from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
- n. The state or quality of being accurately representative of something.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English
- n. The quality or state of being representative.
from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. The character of being representative.
Sorry, no etymologies found.
Judging probability by representativeness is indeed associated with systematic errors.
Because the definition of representativeness is abstract and a little hard to understand, let’s look at some more concrete examples of how this heuristic works, and how it can lead to major mistakes in many situations.
The goodness is the specific representativeness, that is, the average group-represented-to-majority ratio.
He admitted that Senator North had proved himself possessed of the faculty of what Herbert Spencer calls representativeness more than once, but men as wise and calm in their judgment had been mistaken before.
Hamilton had in an extraordinary degree the faculty which Spencer calls representativeness; but there were some things he could not foresee, and one was that when the Republicans insinuated themselves to power they would rest on their laurels, let play the inherent conservatism of man, and gladly accept the goods the Federal party had provided them.
This tendency to extrapolate recent history into the future-called "representativeness bias" in behavioral finance-leads to poor investment decisions and can be hazardous to your investment health.
And psychological experiments show that the human brain is wired in a way that creates unfounded impressions that what one has seen or experienced is a constant reality, and that an isolated event or series of events may be interpreted as a predictable pattern (a phenomenon known as the representativeness heuristic).
Journal of Women's History 2, no. 1 (1990): 169-82, addresses this issue in her critique of the concept of "representativeness" as a presumptive basis for evaluating the "truth" content of women's oral testimony.
Since there is no established theoretical basis to argue that "opt-in" online panels, which are known as non-probability volunteer-based Internet surveys, can used to estimate the attitudes of the general population, the report stated that "claims of 'representativeness' should be avoided when using these sample sources."
The G7 industrialised countries Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, United Kingdom and United States agreed that its limited 'representativeness' in the wake of successful opening up and integration of international capital markets required a broader group - inclusive of emerging economies.