PSY 240 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahneman, Availability Heuristic
10 Dec 2020
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Document Summary
As social perceivers, we are limited in our ability to process all relevant information, or we may lack the kinds of training needed to employ fully the principles of attribution theory. More important, we often don"t make an effort to think carefully about our attributions. The problem is that speed brings bias and perhaps even a loss of accuracy. One rule of thumb that has particularly troublesome effects on attribution is the availability heuristic, a tendency to estimate the odds that an event will occur by how easily instances of it pop to mind. Our estimates of likelihood are heavily influenced by events that are readily available in memory. The availability heuristic can lead us astray in two ways: it gives rise to the false-consensus effect, a tendency for people to overestimate the extent to which others share their opinions, attributes, and behaviours.
