Heuristics and Biases in Audience Decision Making 221of communication networks that allowed members of fi ve-person groups to converse with one
another. In groups with highly centralized networks, networks in which only one group member
could directly communicate with every other group member, the member in the central, and thus
most salient, position was chosen to be the group leader in 100% of the groups. In the less central-
ized networks in which no one group member was more salient than any other, group members in
every position had an equal chance to be chosen as their group’s leader.^140
Comprehension-Related Heuristics and Biases
The easier a message is for an audience to comprehend the more likely it is to persuade them.
Thus, any communication technique that makes comprehension easy will also promote heuris-
tic processing. For example, listeners are more persuaded by spoken messages that are easy to
comprehend—well organized and delivered fl uently—than by either a well-organized message
delivered nonfl uently or by a randomly ordered message delivered fl uently.^141 When the compre-
hensibility of product information is manipulated—by varying information exposure time and
the audience’s relevant prior knowledge—consumers fi nd the same product information to be
more persuasive when it is easy to comprehend than when comprehension is diffi cult.^142
The Representativeness and Causality Heuristics
Two well-studied heuristics that are related to ease of comprehension and that are often contrasted
with normative rules for decision making are the representativeness heuristic and the causality
heuristic.
The representativeness heuristic may be the most basic and widely used of all the heuristics.^143Audiences use the representativeness heuristic when their subjective experience of easily catego-
rizing or stereotyping a stimulus based on descriptive, anecdotal, or otherwise easy-to-understand
information leads them to give little or no weight to equally relevant or more relevant quantita-
tive, statistical, or otherwise hard-to-comprehend information about the stimulus.^144 For example,
recruiters of MBAs use the representativeness heuristic any time they base their hiring decisions on
the extent to which the MBAs “look like” or “act like” successful managers.^145
Audiences use the causality heuristic when their subjective experience of easily comprehendingexplanations or predictions of events presented in the form of stories leads them to give little or
no weight to equally relevant or more relevant explanations or predictions presented in a quantita-
tive, statistical, or otherwise hard-to-comprehend way.^146 Audiences automatically comprehend
sequences of events in terms of stories, or causal schemata, even when they realize no causal rela-
tionship exists between the events.^147 The ease or fl uency of causal thinking makes decisions based
on stories very compelling. It also inhibits the audience from revising its causal schemata except in
rare instances.^148
Base-Rate Neglect: The Intuitive Appeal of Anecdotal Evidence
One of the most studied biases related to the representativeness heuristic is base-rate neglect. In this
bias, audiences overlook relevant but diffi cult-to-comprehend statistical information and base their
decision on the extent to which easy-to-comprehend anecdotal or descriptive information fi ts a
stereotype instead.
In a landmark series of experiments that explored base-rate neglect, Nobel laureate DanielKahneman and his colleague Amos Tversky told one group of college students that a person had
been chosen at random from a set of 100 people consisting of 70 engineers and 30 lawyers.^149