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Introduction
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When something resembles a familiar pattern, the pattern often comes to mind as an explanation. A message looks official, a person seems like an experienced organizer, or a sequence appears too regular to be random.
The representativeness heuristic uses resemblance to judge category membership, likelihood, or cause. It can be useful when the resemblance is genuinely informative. It can mislead when we ignore how common the categories are, how else the feature could arise, or how much variation to expect.
The central question is whether the case merely looks like a familiar example or provides enough evidence to support the conclusion.