What Is Availability Bias

The availability bias or heuristic is the tendency to judge the frequency or probability of an event or situation in terms of how easy it is to think of examples of that event or situation. Therefore, in using this heuristic, the most important factor for people is not the content of the memory, but the ease with which to remember or you imagine content.

Therefore, if you are wondering what the meaning of availability bias is, it can be defined as a mental shortcut which is based on immediate examples that come to the mind of a given person when evaluating a specific topic, concept, method or decision. Find out what other cognitive biases exist.

The use of availability bias evidences a basic principle of social thought: people are slow to deduce particular cases from a general truth, but they are incredibly fast to deduce a general truth from a living case. The availability bias derives, in effect, from the human mind’s demand for make decisions quickly taking into account one’s own past experience (direct experience) or that of others (indirect experience).

Despite being an ineffective strategy, it has the advantage of transmitting experience between generations about the most important events in order to avoid repetition of the same mistakes. For example, proverbs, fairy tales, etc. Discover how to learn from past mistakes.

If an event has a strong emotional influence on the human mind, it is very likely that it is also an important event. From an evolutionary point of view, the availability bias is a fast and effective strategy, although only partially, to give the best possible response in a situation of limited information<

The cognitive availability heuristic bias also explains why strong anecdotes can be more convincing than statistical information and why perceived risk is often separated from actual risks.

What is availability to make a trial? This is based on the assumption that If something can be easily remembered, it must be important, or at least more important than alternative solutions that are not so easily recoverable. According to this dynamic, people tend to orient their judgments largely on topics that are the subject of more recent information, forming new opinions erroneously conditioned by the latest news.

It is clear that our naive statistical intuitions and subsequent fears are not guided by calculations or reasoning, but by emotions in tune with the availability heuristic. This can lead to attributing excessive weight to a situation experienced and therefore, for example, being afraid of the wrong things.

The availability of consequences associated with an action is positively correlated with perceptions of the extent of the consequences of that action. In other words, the easier it is to remember the consequences of something, the more these consequences will be perceived as more important. Often, People trust the content of their beliefs if their implications are not questioned because of the difficulty they have in examining the topic in question.

Causes of availability bias

Availability bias is a cause of effective irrational behaviors in consumption options. In the contemporary age, man can access a greater amount of information than in the past, but he mainly follows a cognitive-decision-making process based on the availability of information, memory and hearing.

For example, a consumer makes their purchasing decisions on inadequate information, with the risk of making bad decisions and wasting their money.

Since the news sequence about air accidents is a memory readily available to many, particularly after September 11, 2001, traveling by plane is often considered more dangerous than by car. Next, we will see examples of availability bias regarding this topic.

Examples from 9/11

Between 2000 and 2001, American travelers were 39.5 times more likely to die in a car accident than on a flight covering the same distance. For most air travelers, the most dangerous part of the trip was the car ride to the airport.

Immediately after 9/11, many people abandoned flights and took to the roads. Myers (2001) had estimated that if Americans had flown 20% less than driving miles, another 800 road deaths could be expected in the following year. In this article, we tell you the meaning, causes, symptoms and treatment of aerophobia or fear of flying.

A German researcher took the time to verify that prediction and confirmed an increase of about 350 deaths in the last three months of 2001, compared to the average for the last three months of the last five years (Gigerenzer, 2004). The terrorists who died on September 11 killed more anonymous people than the 266 people who lost their lives on the four hijacked planes.

This article is merely informative, at PsychologyFor we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.

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