{"id":154,"date":"2021-04-04T05:36:27","date_gmt":"2021-04-04T05:36:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/psychologyandsociety.com\/?p=154"},"modified":"2025-06-21T18:56:24","modified_gmt":"2025-06-21T18:56:24","slug":"the-availability-heuristic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/psychologyandsociety.com\/index.php\/2021\/04\/04\/the-availability-heuristic\/","title":{"rendered":"The Availability Heuristic"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center\"><strong>By Brad Bell<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The availability heuristic is an important concept in psychology. &nbsp;What is the availability heuristic? &nbsp;&nbsp;Tversky and Kahneman (1973) proposed that people may use an availability heuristic to judge frequency and the probability of events. &nbsp;Using the availability heuristic, people would judge the probability of events by the ease in which instances could be brought to mind. &nbsp;Thus, using the availability heuristic, people would judge an event to be more likely to occur if they could think of more examples of that event. &nbsp;<br><br>Below are some examples of availability heuristic:<br><br><strong>First Availability Heuristic Example:<br><br><\/strong>After seeing many news stories of home foreclosures people may judge that the likelihood of this event is greater. &nbsp;This may be true because it is easier to think of examples of this event.<br><br><strong>Second Availability Heuristic Example:<br><br><\/strong>People who read more case studies of successful businesses may judge the probability of running a successful business to be greater.<br><br><strong>References<br><br><\/strong>Tversky, A., &amp; Kahneman, D. &nbsp;(1973). &nbsp;&nbsp;Availability: &nbsp;A heuristic for judging frequency and probability.  <em>Cognitive Psychology<\/em>,&nbsp;<em>5<\/em>, 207-232.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Brad Bell The availability heuristic is an important concept in psychology. &nbsp;What is the availability heuristic? &nbsp;&nbsp;Tversky and Kahneman (1973) proposed that people may use an availability heuristic to judge frequency and the probability of events. &nbsp;Using the availability heuristic, people would judge the probability of events by the ease in which instances could &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/psychologyandsociety.com\/index.php\/2021\/04\/04\/the-availability-heuristic\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;The Availability Heuristic&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-concepts","category-judgment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/psychologyandsociety.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/psychologyandsociety.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/psychologyandsociety.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/psychologyandsociety.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/psychologyandsociety.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=154"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/psychologyandsociety.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":601,"href":"https:\/\/psychologyandsociety.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154\/revisions\/601"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/psychologyandsociety.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/psychologyandsociety.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/psychologyandsociety.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}