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Concept
Availability heuristic
Summary
The availability heuristic, also known as availability bias, is a mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to a given person's mind when evaluating a specific topic, concept, method, or decision. This heuristic, operating on the notion that, if something can be recalled, it must be important, or at least more important than alternative solutions not as readily recalled, is inherently biased toward recently acquired information.
The mental availability of an action's consequences is positively related to those consequences' perceived magnitude. In other words, the easier it is to recall the consequences of something, the greater those consequences are often perceived to be. Most notably, people often rely on the content of their recall if its implications are not called into question by the difficulty they have in recalling it.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman began work on a series of papers examining "heuristic and biases" used in the judgment under uncertainty. Prior to that, the predominant view in the field of human judgment was that humans are rational actors. Kahneman and Tversky explained that judgment under uncertainty often relies on a limited number of simplifying heuristics rather than extensive algorithmic processing. Soon, this idea spread beyond academic psychology, into law, medicine, and political science. This research questioned the descriptive adequacy of idealized models of judgment, and offered insights into the cognitive processes that explained human error without invoking motivated irrationality. One simplifying strategy people may rely on is the tendency to make a judgment about the frequency of an event based on how many similar instances are brought to mind. In 1973, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman first studied this phenomenon and labeled it the "availability heuristic". An availability heuristic is a mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to a given person's mind when evaluating a specific topic, concept, method, or decision.
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