PSYC 336 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Availability Heuristic

• School: University of San Diego
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 336
• Professor: Appleton-Knapp

Document Summary

Heuristic an efficient strategy that usually leads to the right answer. Allows errors the price you pay in order to gain the efficiency. In each case, you"re relying on an attribute (availability or resemblance) that"s easy to assess, and that"s the source of efficiency. The attribute is correlated with the target dimension, so it can serve as a reasonable proxy for the target. The organization of memory creates a bias in what"s easily available. Leads to an error in frequency judgment. People regularly overestimate the frequency of events that are quite rare. Little reason to spend time thinking about familiar events, but you"re likely to notice and think about rare, emotional events. Rare events are likely to be well recorded in memory make these events easily available to you. Rely on the availability heuristic overestimate the frequency of these distinctive events overestimate the likelihood of similar events happening in the future.