Question at position 60 Many smokers like to associate themselves to the late George Burns, a famous actor who smoked cigars continuously for many years and lived to be nearly a hundred, as evidence that smoking is relatively harmless. These individuals tend to ignore the thousands of people who die every year from lung cancer. They are illustratinghindsight bias.confirmation bias.the representativeness heuristic.the availability heuristic.

Question

BlackTom AI · Accepted Answer

Restating the scenario and the options helps set the stage for evaluating each choice.
Question: Many smokers associate themselves with George Burns, who smoked cigars for many years and lived to be nearly 100, using this as evidence that smoking is relatively harmless. They tend to ignore the thousands who die each year from lung cancer. Which bias are they illustrating?
Answer options:
- hindsight bias.
- confirmation bias.
- the representativeness heuristic.
- the availability heuristic.

Option 1: hindsight bias. Hindsight bias is the tendency to see events as having been predictable after they have already happened (the I-knew-it-all-along effect). In this scenario, the smokers are not reflecting on past events with that bias; they are selectively attending to information that fits a preexisting belief rather than misremembering past predictability. Therefore, this option is not the best fit.

Option 2: confirmation bias. This is the tendency to favor information that confirms one’s preconceptions while dismissing or undervaluing contradicting information. The smokers cherry-pick Burns’s example as evidence that smoking is harmless and ignore the vast data on lung cancer deaths, which is a textbook illustration of confirmation bias. This option directly matches the described behavior.

Option 3: the representativeness heuristic. This heuristic involves judging the probability of something by how much it resembles a typical case, rather than using base rates. While Burns’s long life might superficially resemble a “smoking isn’t harmful” prototype, the core behavior described—ignoring contrary evidence—aligns more with selectively accepting confirming information than with a probabilistic similarity judgment. Thus this option is not the best explanation.

Option 4: the availability heuristic. This occurs when people judge the likelihood of an event by how easily examples come to mind. If the smokers were basing their belief on how often they see or recall stories of atypical long-lived smokers, this could be relevant. However, the key element in the scenario is ignoring a large amount of contrary data rather than letting easy recall drive belief about risk, making confirmation bias the more precise characterization.

Summary of why each option differs: hindsight bias would involve misremembering past predictability; representativeness would involve judging probability by similarity to a stereotype; availability would hinge on memory ease of recall influencing belief about risk. The described behavior—rejecting extensive contrary evidence in favor of a single anecdote—best aligns with confirmation bias, where evidence supporting one’s preconceptions is favored while disconfirming evidence is ignored.

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