Availability heuristic refers to a mental rule of thumb whereby people base a judgment on the ease with which they can bring something to mind.
It is often used to make probability estimates, which depends on the frequency with which certain events readily come to mind. This can lead to errors, since, for example, very vivid events will be remembered out of proportion to their actual frequency of occurrence.
Other /More definition:
Availability heuristic refers a judgment based on the information readily available in memory; the tendency to judge the frequency or likelihood of an event by the ease with which relevant instances come to mind and the tendency to base a judgment on how easily relevant examples can be generated.
Other /More definition:
Availability heuristic refers to a strategy in which one estimates the frequency or probability of an event by the ease with which mental operations, such as retrieval of examples or construction of examples, can be carried out.
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