Talk:Availability heuristic

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 19 August 2019 and 12 December 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Gen Wood. Peer reviewers: VictoriaNorth91, KatiePetti, Paytdaddy, Cecethack.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 15:05, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

Stomach Cancer
The examples involving stomach cancer are a bit dated. It's a common cause of death worldwide, but relatively uncommon in the US. In 2008 there were 8.5 deaths per 100,000 (per CDC cancer stats), and the rate is falling. The 2010 homicide rate was 4.5 per 100,000 (2010 FBI Stats). The ratio isn't as high as it used to be, and the numbers will likely be equal soon. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.163.7.132 (talk) 20:03, 16 August 2012 (UTC)


 * What? Let's talk flat numbers. 14,000+ deaths from homicide in the U.S. vs. approximately 10,500 deaths from stomach cancer in the U.S. This is not a question of per 100,000 because we're talking about the same population during the same time period. This statement: "For example, in the USA, people rate the chance of death by homicide higher than the chance of death by stomach cancer, even though death by stomach cancer is five times higher than death by homicide," is simply false. I suspect the author meant the chance of death by stomach cancer *among people diagnosed with stomach cancer*, but did not say that. Or perhaps the person meant homicide by firearm??Badmuthahubbard (talk) 06:58, 13 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Incidentally, I just checked the CDC stats and got: Cancer sites: stomach; Year: 2008; Deaths: 11,352; Population: 304,374,846; Age-adjusted rate per 100,000: 3.5. Where did you see 8.5?Badmuthahubbard (talk) 06:58, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Neutrality
i came to this article wanting to learn about what the availablitiy heuristic was. i thank the original author for presenting it with some examples, but the political examples are just distracting. i get the point that the examples are illustrating, so it isn't that they "don't work", but it seems like such a simple concept that it would be just as easy (and more effective i believe) to use a more pedestrian example. i'm practically an anarchist and "bush" leaves just as bitter of a taste in my mouth as the original author's. but the original author does everyone a disservice by distracting them from the subject. if the author feels s/he is doing some service to society by inserting his/her politics into a non-political subject s/he is pretty useless to anyone who seeks knowledge (and to the universe in general)... Nic.stage 06:51, August 26, 2005 (UTC)

Heh. &mdash;The preceding unsigned comment was added by 212.17.60.230 (talk • contribs) 09:10, January 20, 2005.

Dear Heh, I agree that this article contains an unnecessary amount of political content that may be perceived by many as POV rhetoric, so I have stamped the page with the big stop_hand.png, in hopes of soliciting non-political examples. &mdash;  F REAK OF N URxTURE  ( TALK )  09:28, July 11, 2005 (UTC)

There is no better example of the use (abuse) of know cognitive biases that in the rhetorical devices of Bush speeches. These have been carefully studies and demonstrated, see documentaries like "Power of Nightmares" or "Fahrenheit 9/11". Although all rhetoric makes use of fallacious reasoning, there is good reason to believe that the rhetoric surrounding the invasion of Iraq was carefully constructed to make use of pre-existing biases to sway consent and create a will-to-war without any reasonable evidence. The fact that this example occured in the political realm should emphasise its importance, not downplay its validity. Say no to the hand.

B

This is abuse of the neutrality bar. The example doesn't need to be factual. It's an example. You have the right to disagree with it. The point of an example is that it illustrates the concept being discussed, whether it's real or not. If you have no real neutrality dispute about how the availability heuristic is being presented, get the dispute bar out of there. Invoking political situations in an example doesn't give you the prerogative to dispute an article for political reasons. On top of which, Wikipedia has long since abandoned all pretense of being factual, unbiased, or respectable. Let your bleeding heart dispute every article, if this one.

IMNSHO ... the political examples were not good examples of the availability heuristic anyway. (As I remember it from when I taught this material at AFIT).

That seems the be the strategy in academia. Associate members opposite to your political affiliations with fallacious or negative reasoning. Best way of producing the groupthink prevalent in college. Interesting how a previous poster noted Moore's work as documentary that exposes Bush's bad reasoning when the some may argue Moore's own documentary is full of false logic.

Really.. is it so hard to use a non-political example?

You could argue also more people die of cancer than AIDS, yet somehow political influences pump more money into AIDS research.

This should not be a problem. Just change the examples. Bertus 14:31, 22 September 2005 (UTC)

Merge "Availability error" into "Availability heuristic"
Availability error is an example of an error due to use of the availability heuristic. I believe the availability error page should be deleted, and any novel content moved into the availability heuristic page (some of the examples and cross-links to related ideas, like gambler's fallacy). Availability heuristic is a common, published term for a specific type of heuristic leading to a cognitive bias. Availability error is not a term I am familiar with, and sounds like a misnomer. Podkayne 01:48, 20 February 2006 (UTC)


 * I agree Headlouse 07:07, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Done Headlouse 07:47, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

Remove Bush example
The reference to President Bush should be removed for two reasons. First, the syntax of the sentence implies that he is the current president which will be untrue after his term ends. Second, people who don't live in the United States might not know that President Bush and Congress are spending a lot of money on air traffic security.

Better examples
"Many people seem to fear plane crashes, yet one is far more likely to be harmed in a car accident on the way to the airport. Similarly, much more money is spent on fighting terrorism than on preventing car crashes, yet the latter kill many more people per year." - These don't seem to be good examples, especially the latter one, for two reasons. First, car accidents aren't that difficult for most people to imagine; even if there is an availability heuristic at play here, it's so subtle that this amounts to a terribly mediocre example. Second, this is an oversimplification, and thus a violation of WP:NPOV (in not providing more than one explanation for terrorists vs. car crashes) and possibly a number of other Wikipedia policies, because it states as though it were a hard, widely-accepted fact the theory that people are more afraid of terrorist attacks than car accidents specifically because of that theory. Even if you can find a source which states that much, the example is too complicated and dubious to be a remotely useful one for clarifying the cognitive bias this article focuses on. I recommend replacing it with a better example or two. -Silence 09:05, 31 May 2006 (UTC)

Denial as a reverse of availability?
The paragraph saying that denial is the reverse seems to be unreferenced original research. Also, it seems to be based on a misconception about availability: the example given seems either irrelevant or an example of cognitive dissonance. I'm going to remove the whole section. If there are reliable sources to make the claim that denial is the reverse of availability, they need to be in the article. MartinPoulter (talk) 14:38, 17 December 2009 (UTC) (updated this talk post because I'd got two articles confused) MartinPoulter (talk) 14:40, 17 December 2009 (UTC)

Additional sources
Schwarz, N., Strack, F., Bless, H., Klumpp, G., Rittenauer-Schatka, H., & Simons, A. (1991). Ease of retrieval as information: Another look at the availability heuristic. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61(2), 195-202. I will use this source for some background on the Availability Heuristic. The results and discussion sections will be useful because it shows that recall from the availability heuristic affected self-judgments. Participants indicated that the ease of recall influenced them when evaluating their assertiveness. Participants who recalled 6 examples of assertive behaviors rated themselves less assertive than participants who recalled 12 examples.

Folkes, V. S. (1988). The availability heuristic and perceived risk. Journal of Consumer Research, 15, 13-23. Links AH to more practical uses. AH influences consumers’ judgments about the likelihood of products failing. Ease of recalling failure incidents was correlated with judging the product to fail while recalling success influenced participants to judge that the product would succeed.

Hayibor, S., & Wasieleski, D. M. (2009). Effects of the use of the availability. Journal of Business Ethics, 84, 151-165. doi: 10.1007/s10551-008-9690-7 Found that the availability of consequences associated with an act was positively related to perceptions of how great the consequences were. Integrates morality and AH : AH of others who believe that an act is morally acceptable is positively related to perceptions of social consensus that that act is morally acceptable. In other words, when one person has an opinion on something, we believe that more people also have that opinion. Talks about the ethics in organizations and using the AH to combat unethical actions

Colin, M., & Campbell, L. (1992). Memory accessibility and probability judgments: An experimental evaluation of the availability heuristic. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63(6), 890-902. Used mood manipulation to influence the AH. People in the sad mood condition recalled better than those in the happy mood condition. This is relevant because it shows some examples of how the AH can be changed or manipulated.

Shedler, J., Manis, M. (1986). Can the availability heuristic explain vividness effects?. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 51(1), pp. 26-36 Shows the AH different reactions to word manipulation versus manipulation by pictures. The more vivid the descriptions were, the more the AH played a role in decisions. Photographs had the largest effect on the AH

Kliger, D., Kudryavtsev, A. (2010). The availability heuristic and investors' reaction to company-specific events. Journal of Behavioral Finance, Vol 11(1), pp. 50-65. Relates the AH to the business world and stock markets. The AH had a higher influence on people when the stock market dropped then it did when the stock market rose

Bentz, B.G., Mahaffey, S.L., Adami, A.M., Romig, D.M., Muenke, R.C., Barfield, S.G., Teer, J.R., DeOrnellas, K. (2009). Debiasing of pessimistic judgments associated with anxiety: A test of the availability heuristic. Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment, Vol 31(1), pp. 20-26. Lmauri1 (talk) 17:00, 5 March 2012 (UTC) Shows how we can use the AH to combat initial biases. Participants who automatically had a pessimistic reaction were asked to think of 6 positive outcomes. Participants rated feeling more positive about the situation afterwards.

McKelvie, S. J. (1997). The availability heuristic: Effects of fame and gender on the estimated frequency on male and female names. The Journal of Social Psychology, 137, 63-78. Participants gave higher estimates of popularity toward names of famous people. Majority of participants chose the famous gender as more frequent than the nonfamous gender

Gana, K., Lourel, M., Fort, I., Mezred, D., Trouillet, R., Blaison, C., Boudjemadi, V., & LastK’Delant, P. (2010). Judgment of riskiness: Impact of personality, naive theories and heuristic. Psychology and Health, 25(2), 131-147. doi: 10.1080/08870440802207975 Availability and anchoring heuristics were used to estimate personal health-related events.The study also found that depressive mood, subjective health, and internal locus of control can override the AH

Read, J. D. (1995). The availability heuristic in person identification: The sometimes misleading consequences of enhanced contextual information. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 9, 91-121. Increased duration of time between exposure and questionnaire to see how time affects the AH. Found that increased time away from the certain stimulus changed how easily recalled it was and thus affected the use of the AH. Explains that first impressions can be changed with decreased exposure to that initial impression

Agans, R. P., & Shaffer, L. S. (1994). The hindsight bias: The role of the availability heuristic and perceived risk. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 15(4), 439-449. Found that participants were capable of making good probability estimates for diseases, accidents, and homicide in foresight, but they made biased estimates in hindsight. Makes the argument that hindsight bias activates the availability heuristic.

Lmauri1 (talk) 22:27, 7 March 2012 (UTC)

Hello! I am a college student and I am planning on making changes to this article in the next few weeks. I am planning on adding information to current sections and also adding more sections. The outline is : Definition,

Overview and History,

Theory,

Findings,

Examples

Lmauri1 (talk) 20:15, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

Suggestions for improvement
This article is too wordy and I feel as though it should have less examples and focus more on explaining heuristics. It also needs to talk about the researchers and their research projects. This will help explain heuristics better. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Maddie1013 (talk • contribs) 02:52, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

Peer Review from Ups46694 (talk) 20:30, 17 October 2012 (UTC)ups46694

This article should have: a good lead section, clear structure, balanced coverage, neutral content, and reliable sources.

Elements that make this article good: •	I like the first five sentences in the leading paragraph. I like the catch phrase; it makes it relatable and understandable. •	The contents look good, there are good subheads. •	The transitions from each section are good, but it could use some tweaking. •	The example section is really good. There are not too many or too few. •	The sources are AMAZING!!!! •	No language problems in the lead. •	External links are good. •	Wonderful see also. •	The structure is wonderful. I like the way each section is broken up. No one section is bigger than the other. It is very balanced. •	The content is neutral. •	The majority of the article has good grammar and good spelling. •	There is no warning banner at the top of the page. •	Besides writing previous studies, the majority of this article names all the groups of people. This article doesn’t use many words like “some” or “many.” •	This article doesn’t have any unsourced opinions or value statements. •	The structure looks really good.

Elements that need improvement: •	This article is a bit lengthy, but not overly lengthy. You need to add some visuals, just to break up the words. •	Under the business and economy section, link outcome availability and risk availability •	More highlighted words! •	Possibly put some bullet points throughout the article so you don’t lose the reader with all of the words. •	Under the important research section there is a missing period after the first paragraph. •	Under the important research section should the two “k’s” in the second paragraph be capitalized? •	The example in the lead should go under the example section. It’s a good example I just don’t think it is necessary in the lead. It causes the lead to be wordy. •	Under the health section, there needs to be a clarification for “a previous research study.” •	Be more specific every time you say a previous study. •	Every section has an adequate amount of words, but don’t write much more under each section.

Review
This article is extremely well written. The lead section is very understandable and summarizes the article well. It could do a better job of summarizing the key points in the article such as what issues availability heuristic is present in. The example included in the opening is a clear example that demonstrates what a availability heuristic is. The overall structure of the article is very clear. It is well outlined and does a good job of presenting the topics in order from history, examples, applications, and critiques of the topic. The topics presented in the article are well balanced. However, the same research experiment (concerning the placement of K's in words) is presented in both the research and examples sections. One of these should be eliminated to avoid repetition. Coverage of the topic is neutral and well sourced. The section at the bottom of the article that looks at the critiques and other opinions concerning the topic is especially insightful. The article has no warning banner and no language errors in the introduction section. All of the research in the article is well sourced and presented fairly. The article refers to no unnamed groups or people. The article may be overly long concerning examples of availability heuristic. There is an example section but then examples are also included in all of the application sections. You man consider removing a few examples from either section to make the article more succinct. The article is well written grammatically and few changes are needed. A comma should be placed before a direct quotation in a sentence. When describing the Reagan and Mondale debate you should more clearly show who these people are and what debate is being looked at.Other than these small changes the article is very good. 12.188.210.142 (talk) 01:32, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

Review
Good Article: – Lead section is understandable o I understand what theory is being presented o Example helped make things more clear – There are numerous headings/subheadings o This helps people jump directly to where they want to go o You can run through this article to see if what information you need is actually presented – This article is very balanced o There is a lot of information presented, but each aspect of the article is presented equally o There doesn’t seem to be one section of this article that receives more attention than another – This article is neutral o While this article presents the readers with examples and applications, it also explains the theory’s critiques – This article is reliable o There are 27 strong sources referenced in this article o Anyone is able to go directly to where the author of this article found the information presented Poor Article: – No warning banner is presented – The lead is good, but a little redundant, but still understandable – After each paragraph, a source is listed – All groups are named – All topics are covered – Each section is given the same amount of attention – There is a good amount of sources listed Bro47024 (talk) 19:24, 15 October 2012 (UTC) Bro47024 (talk) 22:26, 21 October 2012 (UTC)

Very well written article! I would suggest adding an external link to illusory correlation, as that is a specific term that non-Cognitive people may not be familiar with. I agree with previous reviewers regarding the K as first or third letter example. I would elaborate a bit more on the research section and then remove it entirely from the examples section. The first example is an example of the anecdotal evidence "I know a man who..." I would move that smoking example to the paragraph about anecdotes. 69.160.138.33 (talk) 21:46, 24 October 2012 (UTC)dguyla

One sentence needs work
I was reading this article, and when I came across the sentence "The crique is here that you tend to easier recall content of the same category you already recealled, instead of basing the recall on mental images" I saw so many flaws that I honestly didn't even understand what it meant to say. I've tried to fix some (such as what I assume was the typo of 'critique' as 'crique' and also the way that it was in second person) by amending it to "The critique here is that one tends to more easily recall content if it is of the same category to content one already recalled, as compared to when one is basing the recall on mental images." However, I don't know if that's actually saying what the sentence was meant to, since I don't understand the original sentence and also I don't have access to the source. Hopefully I've moved it in the right direction at least, and I very much welcome any other editors to amend it further if they understand what it should actually say. Alternatively, it might be best to just remove the sentence (I can't tell if it actually adds anything since I can't tell what it's saying). Apart from that one sentence, this seems to me to be a good article. BreakfastJr (talk) 01:19, 28 October 2013 (UTC)


 * Yes, quite obscure, maybe an attempt to show a difference between representativeness heuristic (mental images and categories) and availability heuristic (recent idea). Who knows? --Pgreenfinch (talk) 18:40, 28 October 2013 (UTC)
 * I tried to copyedit the critiques section earlier. Now I have restored it to how it was before started editing it. I hope someone else will be more successful than I was. --Spannerjam 19:05, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

K as first letter vs K as third letter
Was reading psychology book, mentioned this example for availability heuristic. So I was curious and decided to run results myself. Zyzzyva, using the OWL2 dictionary, states that there are 1857 words that start with K (pattern match K*). Meanwhile there are only 935 words that have K as third letter (pattern match ??K*). (Incidentally, 2nd letter: 513, 4th letter: 3840, 5th letter: 2389, 6th letter: 1067, 7th letter: 1369, 8th letter: 1282, 9th letter: 771, 10th letter: 269, 11th letter: 109, 12th letter: 37, 13th letter: 11, 14th letter: 2). Yes, as this is a Scrabble dictionary, only words of length 15 and under are counted, but that should not make a significant sway in either direction. At any rate, the salient result of all this is that there are in fact twice as many words that start with K as there are words with K as the third letter. I probably agree that the words with K as the third letter are by far more commonly used than those with K at the beginning, but the other claim is false. "There are three times more words with "K" in the third position than words that begin with "K"."--108.83.23.49 (talk) 08:12, 13 January 2014 (UTC)


 * You are correct, there are not more words with K in the third position at all, much less 3 times as many. I have also checked if "a typical text contains twice as many words that have "K" as the third letter than "K" as the first letter." This is also not true. I found a ratio of 2:1 or higher in only 21% of texts. In over half of the texts in the The Open American National Corpus there are more that have "K" as the first letter than the third. This appears to be an uncorrected mistake in the source material. Most likely, I think they were using atypical texts in their study. Asclepius&#39;Rooster (talk) 12:00, 13 August 2023 (UTC)

Introduction of sources that may not be reliable
I recently copyedited the sources for this page and I noticed that this constructive edit introduced a couple of sources that may not be rock solid. Ihaveacatonmydesk (talk) 23:44, 4 November 2014 (UTC)

Proposed Edits
As part of a class project, these are the edits we are proposing to this wikipedia page.

Even though, Tversky and Kahneman is cited on the wikipedia page, their original paper introducing the availability heuristic has many more examples that are relevant to the understanding of the availability heuristic. This broader range of examples will help readers understand the basic applications the availability heuristic and how these small mental shortcuts can lead to major errors when judging frequency and probability. I plan to add examples from the Availability for Retrieval section of their paper to the Mechanisms and Explanations portion of the Wikipedia page. Examples include: frequency of repetition, frequency of co-occurrence, and illusory correlations in word pairs and personality traits. While the page does include the K and T letter example, the original paper offers many more examples across varying domains and tasks to support their idea, especially when it comes to estimating frequency. Examples including: Assessment of visual puzzle and pattern tasks, estimating math tasks, and a critical task showing a difference between availability judgments and representative judgments. Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1973). Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability. Cognitive Psychology, 5(2), 207-232.

There is much missing in the Wikipedia page when it comes to the “Judging frequency and probability” section. The section states that availability and frequency are correlated but there are other factors to consider. It never highlights what these factors are or even what these factors could be. For one there is an importance to elaborate the difference between frequency and another construct called set-size. The set-size depends more on recall and is affected by bias in the recall which could lead to further research like could this make it set size recall more easily obstructed by variables like cognitive overload. Although both use availability heuristics, research like from Manis et al. suggests that recall does not affect frequency availability. My plan would be to add definitions of the constructs, how they differ, what this difference means and where we could go from there. Manis, M., Jonides, J., Shedler, J., & Nelson, T. E. (1993). Availability Heuristic in Judgments of Set Size and Frequency of Occurrence. Journal Of Personality & Social Psychology, 		65(3), 448-457

In the Mechanisms/Explanation section of the Wikipedia page for the availability heuristic there are currently only two citations that discuss when the heuristic occurs. One main situation in which the availability heuristic occurs is when an individual is in some sort of ambiguous situation or what they are encountering has some degree of uncertainty. The research by Vaughn (1999) found that the availability heuristic only occurs when conditions are uncertain. Following the paragraph about research by Schwarz and colleagues I suggest that a new paragraph be added describing in detail Vaughn’s work and why uncertainty causes the availability heuristic to become more present. Things that could also be included in this paragraph are other examples of uncertain situations that may cause someone to use a heuristic. Vaughn, L. A. (1999). Effects of uncertainty on use of the availability of heuristic for self-efficacy judgments. European Journal Of Social Psychology, 29(2/3), 407-410. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.102.48.205 (talk) 03:46, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

Prior to the work of Kahneman and Tversky
"Prior to the work of Kahneman and Tversky, the predominant view in the field of human judgment was that humans are rational actors..."

This is nonsense. This was only ever true for a small set of all people, e.g., rational choice economists. Plato's metaphor of humans being tugged between rational choices and the passions was the dominant view for much of human history. GeneCallahan (talk) 05:07, 7 October 2016 (UTC)

"police immorality"?
In the media section it says "police immorality" but this doesn't make any sense in the context. I would fix it, but I'm not quite sure what it was meant to say. "Police mortality" maybe? Still feels awkward. &mdash;Memotype:: T 22:42, 12 March 2018 (UTC)

Words beginning with t versus k
In the "Overview and history" section, it says "if a person is asked whether there are more words in the English language that begin with a t or k, the person will probably be able to think of more words that begin with the letter t, concluding that t is more frequent than k". Is this a garbled version of the experiment where people had to guess whether k was more common as a first letter than as a third letter? Or is it supposed to be an example of an occasion where the availability heuristic actually gives a correct answer (unlike most of the examples on the page)? If the latter, this should be made clearer; the current wording implies, incorrectly, that people's conclusion that initial t is more frequent than initial k is mistaken. 82.1.213.89 (talk) 13:05, 1 November 2018 (UTC)RachaelChurchill

Peer Review
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Gen%20Wood/Availability_heuristic/Cecethack_Peer_Review?preload=Template%3ADashboard.wikiedu.org_peer_review

This sentence should be clearer.
"Most notably, people often rely on the content of their recall if its implications are not called into question by the difficulty that they experience in bringing the relevant material to mind."

This site is so bad for these garbled, needlessly contrived sentences that must be reread several times to extract any meaning from them. Should be more concise. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.121.142.230 (talk) 15:54, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

"Should be conducted"?
In the section Critiques / Alternative explanations, what do "future studies should be conducted" and "this finding suggests that more research should be conducted" mean? They sound like recommendations, but to nobody in particular. And does this belong in a Wikipedia article?

-- Andrew S. 72.95.231.181 (talk) 18:14, 21 December 2020 (UTC)
 * Good catch. Removed both sentences. --Hob Gadling (talk) 06:50, 22 December 2020 (UTC)

"The availability heuristic, also known as availability bias"
Actually, those are not quite synonyms. People using the availability heuristic have or cause the availability bias. But I have no better suggestion at the moment. --Hob Gadling (talk) 13:40, 22 December 2020 (UTC)