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Availability heuristic was nominated as a Social sciences and society good article, but it did not meet the good article criteria at the time (April 27, 2012). There are suggestions on the review page for improving the article. If you can improve it, please do; it may then be renominated.

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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)

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.—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 NUR_xTURE (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, Misplaced Pages 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 Misplaced Pages 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)

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