Examples
- A person claims to a group of friends that those who drive red cars receive more speeding tickets. The group agrees with the statement because a member of the group drives a red car and frequently receives speeding tickets. The reality could be that he just drives fast and would receive a speeding ticket regardless of the color of car that he drove. Even if statistics show fewer speeding tickets were given to red cars than to other colors of cars, he is an available example which makes the statement seem more plausible.
- Where an anecdote ("I know a Brazilian man who...") is used to "prove" an entire proposition or to support a bias, the availability heuristic is in play. In these instances the ease of imagining an example or the vividness and emotional impact of that example becomes more credible than actual statistical probability. Because an example is easily brought to mind or mentally "available," the single example is considered as representative of the whole rather than as just a single example in a range of data. A specific example of this taking place would be when a person argues that cigarette smoking is not unhealthy because his grandfather smoked three packs of cigarettes each day and lived to be 100 years old. The grandfather's health could simply be an unusual case that does not speak to the health of smokers in general.
- A person sees several news stories of cats leaping out of tall trees and surviving, so he believes that cats must be robust to long falls. However, these kinds of news reports are far more common than reports where a cat falls out of the tree and dies, which may in fact be a more common event.
- A recent newspaper subscriber might compare the number of newspapers delivered versus those that were not delivered in order to calculate newspaper delivery failure. In this case, the calculation of delivery failure depends on the number of incidents recalled. However, it will be hard to recall all specific instances if the subscriber is trying to recall all newspaper deliveries over an extensive period of time.
Read more about this topic: Availability Heuristic
Famous quotes containing the word examples:
“It is hardly to be believed how spiritual reflections when mixed with a little physics can hold people’s attention and give them a livelier idea of God than do the often ill-applied examples of his wrath.”
—G.C. (Georg Christoph)
“No rules exist, and examples are simply life-savers answering the appeals of rules making vain attempts to exist.”
—André Breton (1896–1966)