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Availability Heuristic

The availability heuristic is the tendency to judge the likelihood or importance of something by how easily examples come to mind, rather than by its actual frequency. You will learn why a single vivid recent event can distort someone's overall judgment out of proportion to its statistical importance.

Chief Galen Tyrol Video

The Availability Heuristic: Tversky and Kahneman's Original Research

A tutorial walking through Tversky and Kahneman's founding research on the availability heuristic and the classic experiments demonstrating that ease of recall distorts frequency judgments.