Citation

Glass AL, Waterman D. Appl. Cogn. Psychol. 1988; 2(3): 173-179.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1988, John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1002/acp.2350020303

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether college students make use of the representativeness heuristic in predicting how entertaining a film will be from a brief description. A group of 45 students were asked to rate how entertaining they expected certain films to be on the basis of brief descriptions. Another group of 45 students were presented with the same film descriptions but asked to recall a film that was similar, and to rate how entertaining the film they had recalled had been. The correlation between the two sets of entertainment ratings was.72, which is consistent with the representativeness hypothesis. However, including the similarity ratings in the equation to predict the entertainment ratings of the film descriptions did not improve the correlation. Also, the film descriptions received significantly lower ratings than the films they reminded the students of.

Language: en