Attribute substitution

Attribute substitution is a psychological process thought to underlie a number of cognitive biases and perceptual illusions.

[2] The theory of attribute substitution unifies a number of separate explanations of reasoning errors in terms of cognitive heuristics.

[1] In turn, the theory is subsumed by an effort-reduction framework proposed by Anuj K. Shah and Daniel M. Oppenheimer, which states that people use a variety of techniques to reduce the effort of making decisions.

[3] In a 1974 paper, psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman argued that a broad family of biases (systematic errors in judgment and decision) were explainable in terms of a few heuristics (information-processing shortcuts), including availability and representativeness.

In 1975, psychologist Stanley Smith Stevens proposed that the strength of a stimulus (e.g., the brightness of a light, the severity of a crime) is encoded neurally in a way that is independent of modality.

The pre-conscious, intuitive nature of attribute substitution explains how subjects can be influenced by the stereotype while thinking that they have made an honest, unbiased evaluation of the other person's intelligence.

Another source of heuristic attributes is emotion: people's moral opinions on sensitive subjects like sexuality and human cloning may be driven by reactions such as disgust, rather than by reasoned principles.

[9] One group of subjects had to rate Tom's similarity to a typical student in each of nine academic areas (Law, Engineering, Library Science etc.).