Exploratory Essay

A heuristic is a mental short cut or rule of thumb that is utilized and unknowingly relied on (Eysenck & Keane, 2015). Dietrich (2010), states that people are constantly making decisions that influence how they live their lives. Heuristics have been researched in order to understand how and why people make decisions. Heuristics tend to serve various functions for different people. Bodenhausen (1990) reports that people typically process information systematically, however, as it diminishes a person may rely on heuristics as a way of simplifying the task of generating specific responses. There are various kinds of heuristics, however, the most studied are the availability heuristic and the representativeness heuristic (Dietrich, 2010; Baraga,

They go on to state that people rely on heuristics in order to reduce the complex tasks of predicting values and assessing likelihoods of certain situations in a simpler manner. Heuristics are useful, however they can lead to errors in decision making and judgement (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). Eysenck and Keane (2015), also share that the availability heuristic tends to cause an overestimation of experiences that affect our judgement. The authors express that the more a person hears of events or experiences the more they may believe it to be true or likely, whether it is or is not. Manis, Shedler, Jonides, and Nelson (1993) state that the availability heuristic is a cognitive strategy that plays a role in judgements of probability as well as frequency. Concrete vivid events are generally perceived as more likely to happen within the availability

A study that demonstrates the availability heuristic was conducted by Manis et al., (1993), which included 73 psychology students. The participants were made up of about 50% men and 50% women. The researchers hypothesized that “set size judgements are reliably affected by the availability in memory of relevant exemplars and frequency of occurrence judgements do not appear to be mediated by availability (recall).” The study presented the participants with stimuli (a list of names), the subjects were asked to answer questions after being presented with the list of names. The participants also completed a memory test and the manipulation of the variable fame was intended by the researchers to produce bias in the relative heuristics ability to increase memory. The findings of the study suggest that free recall, spew order, and recognition was a part of the participants operationalized definition of availability. The researchers found that free recall was the most helpful availability measure, because it was found to maximize the causal link between judgement and memory. Dietrich (2010) explains that when people are asked to read from a list and then identify names from the list the availability heuristic is used because identifiable names are typically famous individuals, which the participants find