Читать книгу The Research Experience - Ann Sloan Devlin - Страница 15

Let’s now turn to the availability heuristic, the second heuristic from Kahneman and Tversky to be discussed. The availability heuristic suggests that humans make decisions to some extent based on how easy it is to think of examples from that domain. One well-known example of Kahneman and Tversky’s work on availability involves the judgment of word frequency (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973). Take the letter K. Question: In words with three or more letters in English text, does the letter K appear more frequently in the first or third position?

When we hear this question about the letter K, what happens? We start to generate words that begin with the letter K because it is available to us. That seems easier to do than to think of words with K in the third position. But, after you’ve run out of key, knife, knight, and knit, you begin to realize that, well, bake, cake, fake, lake, make, rake, take, bike, hike, like, mike, … (k in the third position) generates far more possibilities; in fact, two times as many in a typical text (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973).

The availability heuristic emerges in research in many ways. For example, if we develop a questionnaire that first asks people to rate a list of items describing their university in terms of preference (e.g., food, school spirit, academics, career counseling, cost, and residence halls), and then we ask them an open-ended question about advantages and disadvantages of attending that university, the items from that initial list will be available in memory and will likely influence what people say in the open-ended question. If we had asked the open-ended question first, we might get a different set of responses. Thus, the order in which information is presented to participants may influence their responses and is related to the availability heuristic. Chapter 10 discusses one way to address this problem of availability by doing what is known as counterbalancing the order of presentation of materials. In complete counterbalancing, all possible orders of presenting the materials are included in the research approach.

Counterbalancing: Presenting orders of the treatment to control for the influence of confounding variables in an experiment.

Wason Selection Task: Logic problem in which you have to determine which of four two-sided cards need to be turned over to evaluate the stated hypothesis (e.g., if there is a vowel on one side there is an even number on the other).