The Availability Heuristic (Intro Psych Tutorial #92)

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In this video I provide an introduction to behavioral economics and the work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman by describing a heuristic we use when attempting to assess the frequency of events. The availability heuristic is a shortcut that estimates frequency based on how available an event is to us, or how readily we can bring examples to mind. This can cause us to make errors in estimating frequency because ease of recalling events does not necessarily mean that they are more frequent; they may simply be more memorable (such as terrorist attacks, planes crashes, and child abductions). This can cause us to overestimate the likelihood of certain events occurring, while we underestimate the risks posed by events which are actually more frequent.



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