Blog01: An Indian Reception and Heuristics

Yesterday, I attended a wedding reception and discovered draft on tap on the second floor of the hall. Wasting little time, my cousins and I got wasted, feigning an early St. Pat's celebration.

During this period, we all decided to play some meaningless games. One of my cousin's suggested playing 'The Movie Game'. This played by one of the player choosing one letter in alphabet first. Then, each player names a movie which title begins with that forementioned alphabet from memory in turn. A movie can only be named once. Hence, if a player is unable to think of a new movie, he is eliminated. The person with the most movie titles beginning with that letter wins and, subsequently, chooses the next letter to play.

While playing, I found very odd that we all tended to start off by basically naming titles that we all already knew. By the time we made our third round, we all were basically desperately trying to remember unusual movie titles that no one had thought of yet.

Triggering a memory from lectures, I couldn't help but wonder about availability heuristics - the tendency to base a judgement on how easily relevant examples can be generated. Typically, we were making the same calls for similar letters:

Srijith (on the letter 'S', quickly): Star Wars!
Me & Jeevan (together): Dammit! I was thinking of that!

Not exactly very 'social'. But, I couldn't help but think about how we all think about the stereotypical scenarios based on examplars that are most readily available – how thinking of the last airplane disasters come more readily to mind than the last car crash. Probably, why everyone gets more uptight getting on airplanes than cars when we know that there are more motorway accidents than airborne ones. Hmm...

More to the point, meanwhile, at the wedding, my uncles and aunts were, as expected, summing up the bride and groom. As soon as they were announced into the hall, they began to speculate about the couple's background. The couple came walking down the hall's aisle, dressed very intriguingly.

The groom wore a white jacket with matching pants, with a bright blue shirt, which was half-way unbuttoned, revealing skin and chest hair. In my opinion, he looked like an indian version of John Travolta's character from Saturday Night Fever. He even had the gold chain visible on his chest. However, my relatives thought different:

Uncle 1: Hmm.. the groom don't know how to button his shirt?
Uncle 2: Yeah, the fella must be from some neighbourhood gang.
Aunt 1: Yeah – the bride must be some anjadi also.

The term anjadi refers to a derogative term for an indian gangster. My folks had decided (almost literally) that the groom was some kind of deliquent from the a half-button'd shirt and that wearing the shirt the way that was a sure-fire way of determining if one was from a gang. They even made the extension to that logic by including the bride - that those that goes out (and marries) a gangster is some kind of gangster as well. A bit of representative heuristics at work? It is the tendency to judge the likelihood that a target belongs to a category based on how similar the target is to typical features of the category.

The groom's an accountant. The bride's a sales executive.

Brilliant.

*an afterthought - why wouldn't I consider that an accountant and sales exec couldn't be gang leaders? heuristics, my friends - representative heuristics. haha.