Representativeness Heuristic:An Intrinsic Source Of Misunderstanding

Misunderstanding, as a common language phenomenon, plays an important role in people’s daily communication and thus arises the interests of linguists. During recent years, many researchers devote themselves to disclose the sources of misunderstanding and quite a lot of views have been put forward, which brings us much nearer to the intrinsic source of misunderstanding. Based on these previous researches, the current study endeavors to further investigate the intrinsic causes of misunderstanding from a cognitive psychological perspective.Representativeness heuristic put forward by Kahneman and Tversky, is a type of cognitive bias which can influence an individual’s judgment and reasoning. The present study comes up with such a hypothesis that it is the interference of representativeness heuristic that leads to the divergence of reasoning from the ideal pragmatic model, which is one of the systematic and intrinsic sources of the inevitability of misunderstanding in verbal communication. In order to make the view of the study more persuasive, the present study validates the hypothesis by a questionnaire-oriented method.The questionnaire is designed on the basis of the materials collected from the previous related literature and the conversations in daily communication. There are130subjects tested by the questionnaires, but the valid ones are110. With the help of SPSS, the study verifies the hypothesis by analyzing the data of each question in the questionnaire and that of the whole questionnaire.Because of the limited ability of the author, there are still many limitations in the current study, however, research on the causes of misunderstanding from the cognitive psychological perspective is a relatively new research approach, and may deepen our comprehension of the sources of misunderstanding.