The Availability Heuristic

Abstract

Few fields of psychology have undergone such dramatic conceptual changes over the past dozen years as the emerging science of heuristics. Heuristics are effective cognitive processes that consciously or unconsciously ignore part of information. Good heuristics can greatly reduce the time it takes to solve a problem by avoiding some unlikely possibilities, and although heuristic processes tend to find solutions or outcomes that are often valid or correct, they may only be correct, provable, optimal, or accurate sometimes. However, decision making based on heuristics is often sufficient to solve small-scale problems and provide solutions in uncertain situations where complete information is not available. Heuristics rely on shortcuts to provide immediate, efficient and short-term solutions to facilitate timely decision making. People need to understand how cognitive heuristics work in an uncertain world, combined with practical applications or theory, to help analyze the performance and use areas of heuristics, so that they can continue to evolve and improve.