Representativeness Heuristic
Judging probability by how closely something resembles a typical example, rather than by actual statistics. It's why people expect coin flips to "even out" and why stereotypes feel like predictions.
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Origin
Introduced by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in a seminal 1972 paper. Their famous "Linda problem" demonstrated the effect: when given a description of a politically active woman, people judged it more probable that she was a "feminist bank teller" than simply a "bank teller" — a logical impossibility driven by how representative the description felt. The heuristic explains base rate neglect and the gambler's fallacy.
Updated February 22, 2026