base-rate fallacy

a decision-making error in which information about the rate of occurrence of some trait in a population (the base-rate information) is ignored or not given appropriate weight. For example, given a choice of the two categories, people might categorize a man as an engineer, rather than a lawyer, if they heard that he enjoyed physics at school—even if they knew that he was drawn from a population consisting of 90% lawyers and 10% engineers. See representativeness heuristic.

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Psychology term of the day

November 23rd 2024

transmuting internalization

in self psychology, significant changes and growth that can occur in a patient during treatment as the empathic failures that he or she experienced in early life are recognized and acknowledged by the therapist or analyst. [first described by Austrian-born U.S. psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut (1913–1981)]