Talk:Availability heuristic

message: 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)
thread_title: Stomach Cancer

message: 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.—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. — FREAK OF NURxTURE (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)
thread_title: Neutrality

message: 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)
replies: text: I agree Headlouse 07:07, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

text: Done Headlouse 07:47, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merge "Availability error" into "Availability heuristic" 

message: "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)
thread_title:  Better examples 

message: 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)
thread_title:  Denial as a reverse of availability? 

message: 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)
thread_title:  Additional sources 

message: 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)
thread_title:  Suggestions for improvement 

message: 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)
thread_title: Review

message: 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)
thread_title: Review

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)
replies: text:  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)
thread_title:  One sentence needs work 

message: 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)
replies: text: 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'Rooster (talk) 12:00, 13 August 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  K as first letter vs K as third letter 

message: 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)
thread_title:  Introduction of sources that may not be reliable 

message: 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)
thread_title:  Proposed Edits 

message: "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)
thread_title:  Prior to the work of Kahneman and Tversky 

message: 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. —Memotype::T 22:42, 12 March 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  "police immorality"? 

message: 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)
thread_title:  Words beginning with t versus k 

message: "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)
thread_title:  This sentence should be clearer. 

message: 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)
replies: text: Good catch. Removed both sentences. --Hob Gadling (talk) 06:50, 22 December 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Should be conducted"? 

message: 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)
thread_title:  "The availability heuristic, also known as availability bias"