Availability Heuristic - Overview and History

Overview and History

When faced with the difficult task of judging probability or frequency, people use a limited number of strategies, called heuristics, to simplify these judgements. One of these strategies, the availability heuristic, is the tendency to make a judgement about the frequency of an event based on how easy it is to recall similar instances. In 1973, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman first studied this phenomenon and labeled it the Availability Heuristic. The availability heuristic is an unconscious process that operates on the notion that, "if you can think of it, it must be important." In other words, how easily an example can be called to mind is related to perceptions about how often this event occurs. Thus, people tend to use a readily accessible attribute to base their beliefs about a relatively distant concept.

In an experiment to test this heuristic, Tversky and Kahneman presented participants with four lists of names: two lists with the names of 19 famous women and 20 less famous men, and two lists with the names of 19 famous men and 20 less famous women. The first group was asked to recall as many names as possible and the second group was asked to estimate which class of names was more frequent: famous or less famous. The famous names were most easily recalled compared to the less famous names, and despite the fact that the less famous names were more frequent, the majority of the participants incorrectly judged that the famous names occurred more often. While the availability heuristic is an effective strategy in many situations, when judging probability the availability heuristic can lead to systematic errors.

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