![]() Simon introduced the idea of bounded rationality, which proposed that humans attempt to make the best decisions possible within the intrinsic constraints of their own processing power. A contribution by Herbert Simon in the 1950s helped to make sense of the seemingly unsystematic errors of supposedly rational decision-makers.Errors in judgment were thus both unexpected and unexplainable (Gilovich et al., 2002). This model proposed that when making decisions, humans were able to accurately assess all available options and information in order to make optimal judgments. In the early 1900s, behavioral economic research assumed that humans were entirely rational actors in decision-making, as defined by the purely economic model of rationality.A holistic understanding of the availability bias requires acknowledgment of the theories and models that have defined research in this discipline since the turn of the twentieth century. ![]() The availability bias belongs to a larger framework of heuristics and biases that exists within the field of behavioral economics or the interdisciplinary study of human behavior and decision-making (American Psychological Association).However, the availability bias is also prone to predictable errors in certain situations and thus is not always a reliable shortcut for decision-making. It is often the case that more frequent events are indeed more easily recalled than less frequent events, and so this mental manipulation regularly leads to rapid and accurate judgments in a range of real-world scenarios (Markman & Medin, 2002). Therefore, a person in this situation may (correctly) reason that the former four-legged is considerably more common as a household pet. In all likelihood, it is easier to think of an example of a dog-owning household than it is to think of an example of a ferret-owning household. While the information that is more difficult to bring to mind (i.e., less available) is assumed to reflect less frequent and/or less probable events.Ĭonsider, for example, a person trying to estimate the relative probability of owning a dog versus owning a ferret as a household pet. In other words, information that is more easily brought to mind (i.e., more available) is assumed to reflect more frequent and/or more probable events. ![]() The availability heuristic is a cognitive bias in which you make a decision based on an example, information, or recent experience that is that readily available to you, even though it may not be the best example to inform your decision (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973).
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