Recognizing revisitation of the representativeness heuristic: an analysis of answer key attributes

摘要

The general objective of this article is to contribute to the limited research on teachers’ probabilistic knowledge. More specifically, this article aims to contribute to an established thread of research that investigates relative likelihood comparisons. To meet these objectives, prospective mathematics teachers were presented two different answer keys to a ten question multiple-choice quiz and were asked to determine and justify which of the two was least likely to occur. Unlike previous research, this article does not employ the representativeness heuristic, but, instead, utilizes the attribute substitution model—which stems from the genericism of the heuristics and biases program—to account for specific responses to relative likelihood comparisons. This new perspective demonstrates that certain individuals, when presented one question, answer a different question instead. Results demonstrate that participants substitute a variety of heuristic attributes instead of making the intended relative likelihood comparison of the answer keys presented.