Читать книгу Social Psychology - Daniel W. Barrett - Страница 127

Quick, do more Americans die in homicides or suicides each year? I imagine that your first response was homicides. After all, it is pretty easy to think of the many homicides regularly reported in the press. However, according to the U.S. government, there were over 16,000 homicides and over 41,000 suicides in 2013 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, n.d.). Another question: Are there more words in the English language that begin with the letter r or that have r as the third letter? Although you, like most people, may have guessed that there are more that begin with r, you would be incorrect. There are actually far more English words with r as the third letter (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). What led you to an incorrect inference? Well, it was probably easier for you to rapidly think of more words beginning with r, and you relied on this shortcut in providing your answer.

Table 3.3

Psychologists call this shortcut the availability heuristic; we make a judgment about the frequency or likelihood of an event based on how easily examples come to mind. Information is said to be available when it comes to mind easily (Braga, Ferreira, & Sherman, 2014; Förster & Liberman, 2007; Tversky & Kahneman, 1973). Rather than carefully scanning our internal dictionary for the two categories of words, we base our answer on the availability of relevant information. Judgments based on the availability heuristic often have significant real-world consequences. For instance, financial decisions by investors are often made prematurely (and unwisely) when they rely too much on information that is immediately available—such as how a given stock performed in the prior year—rather than on all relevant information (Kliger & Kudryavtsev, 2010). As we will discuss later in Chapter 10, ease of recall can affect a wide variety of judgments, including how we evaluate strangers in ways that conform to available stereotypes, even if we consciously reject those stereotypes.

Heuristic: Mental shortcut that facilitates rapid inferences without much thought

Availability Heuristic: Mental shortcut in which people judge the frequency or likelihood of an event based on how easily relevant examples come to mind