Among other things, to reiterate, representativeness leads to the belief that causes resemble their effects: Big effects should have big causes, complex effects should have complex causes, and so on. This assumption contains some truth, and so it generally facilitates causal reasoning by narrowing the number of potential causes to consider. But not all causes resemble their effects (again, tiny viruses cause enormous epidemics), and an over-reliance on this assumption can lead people to ignore important causal relations and to “detect” some that are not there. Thus, the very same principle
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