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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.
In psychology, availability is the ease with which a particular idea can be brought to mind. When people estimate how likely or how frequent an event is on the basis of its availability, they are using the availability heuristic. [58] When an infrequent event can be brought easily and vividly to mind, this heuristic overestimates its likelihood.
The availability heuristic (also known as the availability bias) is the tendency to overestimate the likelihood of events with greater "availability" in memory, which can be influenced by how recent the memories are or how unusual or emotionally charged they may be. [20] The availability heuristic includes or involves the following:
Gigerenzer & Gaissmaier (2011) state that sub-sets of strategy include heuristics, regression analysis, and Bayesian inference. [14]A heuristic is a strategy that ignores part of the information, with the goal of making decisions more quickly, frugally, and/or accurately than more complex methods (Gigerenzer and Gaissmaier [2011], p. 454; see also Todd et al. [2012], p. 7).
Heuristics are simple for the brain to compute but sometimes introduce "severe and systematic errors." [6] For example, the representativeness heuristic is defined as "The tendency to judge the frequency or likelihood" of an occurrence by the extent of which the event "resembles the typical case." [13]
The availability heuristic, first identified by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, is a mental shortcut that occurs when people judge the probability of events by how easy it is to think of examples. The availability heuristic operates on the notion that, "if you can think of it, it must be important."
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The availability heuristic is a mental shortcut that occurs when people make judgments about the probability of events on the basis of how easy it is to think of examples. The availability heuristic operates on the notion that, "if you can think of it, it must be important".