The Availability Heuristic
Availability Heuristic: A mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that comes to mind. When you are trying to make a decision, a number of related events or situations might immediately spring to the forefront of your thoughts. As a result, you might judge that those events are more frequent and possible than others. You give greater trust to this information and tend to overestimate the probability and likelihood of similar things happening in the future.
Examples
After seeing news reports about people losing their jobs, you might start to believe that you are in danger of being laid-off. You start lying awake in bed each night worrying that you are about to be fired.
After seeing several television programs on shark attacks, you start to think that such incidences are relatively common. When you go on vacation, you refuse to swim in the ocean because you believe the probability of a shark attack is high.
After reading an article about lottery winners, you start to overestimate your own likelihood of winning the jackpot. You start spending more money than you should each week on lottery tickets.
Availability heuristic influences our decisionns and judgments by remembering something that shapes our impression to make these decisions and lead us astray in our judgments that makes information pop into our minds. Availability heuristic leads us to fear the wrong things and we shouldn’t always fear everything.
Four influences that feed fear and cause us to ignore higher risks
1. We fear what our ancestral history has prepared us to fear
(Confinement and heights, and therefore flying)
2. We fear what we cannot control (We can control a car by driving but not a plane)
3. We fear what is immediate (Teens are indifferent to smoking’s toxicity because they live more for the present than the distant future)
4. We fear what is most readily available in memory (Availability Heuristic)
(Scary, vivid images like 9/11 cause our judgments of risk, we remember and fear natural disasters like hurricanes tornados and earthquakes that kill people instantly)
You May Also Find These Documents Helpful
-
not feel this as personally as an employee who have gotten laid off, if at all.…
- 653 Words
- 3 Pages
Satisfactory Essays -
"Three patterns then emerge in our misestimates. First we prefer voluntary risks to involuntary ones. We feel we have some control over to those that we feel we don't. So we smoke cigarettes even thought it might kill us. While we fight and resent a company that used asbestos in a building. "Secondly we prefer familiar risks to strange ones. The homicide during a mugging, or the airliner hijacked in Athens, so loom much larger in our calculations than they should in terms of a real risk" Third, deaths that come in bunches are more frightening. "The jumbo jet crash…
- 532 Words
- 3 Pages
Good Essays -
When one usually thinks of the word “lottery”, their first thoughts usually go to winning a prize.…
- 517 Words
- 3 Pages
Satisfactory Essays -
There are simple methods to help keep you safe from shark attacks. People should never swim in the ocean at dawn or at dusk when many sharks feed. Do not swim in murky water, or do not swim if you are bleeding.…
- 219 Words
- 1 Page
Satisfactory Essays -
2) Availability: People remember more recent events more intensely than distant events and the more available the event the more likely it will influence our decisions.…
- 1230 Words
- 5 Pages
Powerful Essays -
People who win the lottery are actually anything but happy. Winning the lottery often causes people to fall into debt, people often risk losing their houses because of the bank often takes away their homes. Not only that, but their relationships with family and friends is also likely to fall apart. People who win the lottery often become selfish and end up spending all their money on themselves, when their family and friends attempt to ask them for money things often turn real…
- 84 Words
- 1 Page
Satisfactory Essays -
Within the group of people chosen by President Kennedy as his Executive Committee, there were noted instances of the availability heuristic among many of the members of the group. This heuristic occurs when people access the likely cause of an event based upon information that is readily available in their memories. (Bazerman,…
- 1847 Words
- 8 Pages
Better Essays -
Availability Heuristic: Gives our brains the quick shortcut to the answer we need. We make decision based on what is readily available in our minds rather than examining all the alternatives.…
- 369 Words
- 2 Pages
Satisfactory Essays -
As I began to look into availability heuristic, I soon realized how often people subconsciously partake in it. Before I get head of myself I should first explain what availability…
- 1583 Words
- 7 Pages
Better Essays -
(2) Fear tells us when something is dangerous and can harm us. It is a survival instincts that tell us to fight or take flight. Stephen King works use fear to play with our emotions. In his paper Why We Crave Horror, he explains that fear can helping us release our hidden monsters. “While others use fear to show that we are not afraid, that we can ride this roller coaster... and that's fine, as long as you keep the gators fed”.…
- 579 Words
- 3 Pages
Good Essays -
Fear is often one’s worst inner enemy. It will prompt one to crawl into their darkest corners and hide, and can also cause one to…
- 719 Words
- 3 Pages
Good Essays -
The information organized in our mind is based on a schema; a schema is a collection of linked concepts. When we think about one thing we will also think about something else that relates to it. For example, talking about coffee, we will also mention sugar and cream; talking about penile, we will think about lead and eraser. Then, let’s talk about concept accessibility. It influences our ability of picking the information, which has already existed in our mind. There are three important factors that will influence concept accessibility. First, frequency of access, the more we use a concept, the higher accessibility to this concept we have. Then, emotion significance, some objects may be unforgettable in our mind because of a special experience . Finally, recent of access, if we talk about one things a lot recently, this object will have a high accessibility.…
- 425 Words
- 2 Pages
Good Essays -
Very often the reason for bad decision-making is because of errors or miss-steps in the decision making process, as I have briefly noted. However, sometimes it is mind of the decision maker who is at fault in contrast to the decision making process. Hammond et al has revealed that we use unconscious routines to cope with the complexity inherent in most decisions. These routines are known as “heuristics”. Heuristics can benefit in many situations but in contrast can be misperceived. Another trap is the irrational anaomlies in our thinking. Both flaws are engraved into our thinking process and consequentially we fail to recognize them and ignore them. Pyschological traps can undermine the most carefully considered decisions, and may be even more dangerous than the eight most common errors in decision making listed in Smart Choice’s. “The best protection against these traps is awareness”.…
- 1352 Words
- 6 Pages
Powerful Essays -
Fear can be a strong motivator. . It's one of the oldest forms of motivation and one of the most powerful...in certain situations. Most fears today are intangible fears. They are extremely powerful for the very reason that they are hard to find.…
- 353 Words
- 2 Pages
Good Essays -
1.3Cognitive simplification also holds back decision makers from excelling in difficult situations due to past experiences and information obtained in the past, causing them to shut out promising situations for future prosperity in decision making.…
- 2366 Words
- 10 Pages
Powerful Essays