Daniel Kahneman

Question #3

Discuss and define the availability heuristic, as discussed by Daniel Kahneman in his 2011 book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. In particular, discuss the statistical results of the experiment that compared the vulnerability judgments/behavior changes between test subjects who had a family history of cardiac disease and subjects who did not have a family history of cardiac disease.

Daniel Kahneman (2011) defined the availability heuristic as the process of judging frequency by “the ease with which instances come to mind.”

Schwarz et al. (1991) observed that the classic studies demonstrating the availability heuristic failed to distinguish an interpretation based on ease of retrieval from an alternative interpretation based on content of retrieval in which an event is judged more common when a larger number of examples come to mind. This process has generally been demonstrated by asking participants to assess the relative likelihood of two categories in which instances of the first category are more difficult to recall than instances of the second category, despite the fact that instances of the first category are more common in the world.

Highlighting the role of information accessibility in human judgment has been one of the main topics of social cognition research. Judgment researchers have long been fascinated by how minor events may temporarily influence the accessibility of information in memory, which, in turn, may result in pronounced differences in judgment and behavior.

On the one hand, some researchers focused on what comes to mind, that is, the content that is rendered accessible. Other researchers demonstrated that we rarely retrieve all information that may bear on an issue but base our judgments on the subset of relevant information that is most accessible in memory. In contrast to this emphasis on accessible content, some research focused on how easily something comes to mind, that is, the subjective experience of ease or...