The Availability Heuristic
Early in the work, Groopman discusses the work of Amos Tversky and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, psychologists from Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Specifically, he explores their development in the early 1980s of a concept known as the availability heuristic.
In the theory, "availability" is defined as the tendency to judge the likelihood of explanation for an event by the ease with which relevant examples come to mind. In a clinical situation a diagnosis may be made because the physician often sees similar cases in his practice — for example, the misclassification of aspirin toxicity as a viral pneumonia, or the improper recognition of an essential tremor as delirium tremens due to alcohol withdrawal in an indigent urban setting. Groopman argues that a clinician will misattribute a general symptom as specific to a certain disease based on the frequency he encounters that disease in his practice.
Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002 for his work on heuristics, an honor that Groopman believes Tversky would have shared had he not died in 1996.
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Famous quotes containing the word availability:
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—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)