availability heuristic

Examples of availability heuristic in the following topics:

• Heuristics and Cognitive Biases

  • There are several types of heuristics used to save time when drawing conclusions about large amounts of information, including availability, representativeness, and similarity heuristics.
  • An availability heuristic involves estimating how common an event is based on how easily we can remember the event occurring previously.
  • The availability heuristic leads to people overestimating the occurrence of situations they are familiar with.
  • Since the media covers these "spectacular" occurrences more often, and with more emphasis, they become more available to our memory.
  • We rely on the similarity heuristic all the time when making decisions.

• Decision Making

  • 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. 
  • Dramatic, violent deaths are usually more highly publicized and therefore have a higher availability. 
  • It involves starting from a readily available number—the "anchor"—and shifting either up or down to reach an answer that seems plausible.
  • Lotteries take advantage of the availability heuristic: winning the lottery is a more vivid mental image than losing the lottery, and thus people perceive winning the lottery as being more likely than it is.

• Reasoning

  • We also use a variety of heuristics, or mental shortcuts, when reasoning, solving problems, and making decisions in a limited amount of time.
  • Heuristics help us save time and energy by finding a solution quickly.
  • They are simplistic rules and habitual, automatic thinking responses that free us from exhausting ourselves by trying to process all available information.
  • There are approximately fifteen generally applied heuristics in psychology:
  • Differentiate between the processes of induction, deduction, abduction, and analogy, discussing heuristics that are used in these processes

• Problem-Solving

  • The way we solve problems can be influenced by algorithms, heuristics, intuition, insight, confirmation bias, and functional fixedness.
  • This occurs when objective information is available, but two different sides involved in a debate each believe the information supports their respective beliefs.
  • We use heuristics when we accept information or strategies as 'good enough' for our needs, even though there may be a better method.
  • They are rules that are not necessarily understood, but promise an accurate solution - unlike a heuristic.
  • Examine how algorithms, heuristics, intuition, insight, confirmation bias, and functional fixedness can influence judgment and decision making.

• Kohler and Insight Learning

  • Insight should not be confused with heuristics.
  • A heuristic is a mental shortcut that allows us to filter out overwhelming information and stimuli in order to make a judgement or decision.
  • Heuristics help us to reduce the cognitive burden of the decision-making process by examining a smaller percentage of the information.
  • While both insight and heuristics can be used for problem solving and information processing, a heuristic is a simplistic rule of thumb; it is habitual automatic thinking that frees us from complete and systematic processing of information.
  • While heuristics are gradually shaped by experience, insight is not.

• Problem Solving

  • Two of them, algorithms and heuristics, are of particularly great psychological importance.
  • A heuristic is a rule of thumb, a strategy, or a mental shortcut that generally works for solving a problem (particularly decision-making problems).
  • Unlike a heuristic, you are guaranteed to get the correct solution to the problem; however, an algorithm may not necessarily be the most efficient way of solving the problem.
  • The difference between an algorithm and a heuristic can be summed up in the example of trying to find a Starbucks (or some other national chain) in a city.
  • But a heuristic could simply be, "Well, usually they're at busy intersections; I'll just walk to the nearest busy intersection."

• Prejudice

  • This is thought to be because individuals tend to have more knowledge about members of their own group, so they do not have to rely on heuristics to make judgments about them.
  • Heuristics are simple guidelines that people use to make decisions, come to judgements, and solve problems, typically when facing incomplete information.
  • Heuristics are along the same lines as rules of thumb, stereotypes, educated guesses, intuitive judgements, and profiling.

• Organization

  • These schemas are heuristics, or shortcuts that save time and effort on computation.
  • For example, you might have a perceptual schema that the building where you go to class is symmetrical on the outside (sometimes called the "symmetry heuristic," or the tendency to remember things as being more symmetrical than they are).
  • This is the blessing and curse of schemas and heuristics: they are useful for making sense of a complex world, but they can be inaccurate.

• Cognitive Psychology

  • Cognitive theory contends that solutions to problems take the form of algorithms, heuristics, or insights.

• Conscious vs. Unconscious Emotion

  • It has also been suggested that emotions (affect heuristics, feelings and gut-feeling reactions) are often used as shortcuts to process information and influence behavior.