2 FACES OF REPRESENTATIVENESS - THE EFFECTS OF RESPONSE FORMAT ON BELIEFS ABOUT RANDOM SAMPLING

Two beliefs that act in concert have been proposed as the basis for th e representativeness heuristic in general, and judgments about random sampling in particular: samples resemble their parent populations (res emblance), and random sampling is a self-correcting process (balancing ). Based on the results of a preliminary experiment, we proposed the ' rule-cuing' hypothesis, which is that different aspects of sampling pr oblems can invoke these two beliefs separately. We found that when res ponse formats required subjects to estimate the mean of a sample, subj ects' responses reflected resemblance beliefs, whereas when subjects e stimated the total score in a sample, balancing beliefs were elicited. In additional experiments we eliminated two rival hypotheses: the pro blem difficulty hypothesis, and the arithmetic inconsistency hypothesi s. Results suggest that beliefs, as well as preferences, may be constr ucted on-line in response to task characteristics.