Editing Availability heuristic (section)

==Overview and history==
[[File:Daniel Kahneman (3283955327) (cropped).jpg|thumb|Kahneman's research established that common human errors can arise from [[Heuristics in judgment and decision making|heuristics and biases]].]]
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, [[Amos Tversky]] and [[Daniel Kahneman]] began work on a series of papers examining "heuristic and [[bias]]es" used in judgment under [[uncertainty]]. Prior to that, the predominant view in the field of human [[judgment]] was that humans are [[rational actor]]s. Kahneman and Tversky explained that judgment under uncertainty often relies on a limited number of simplifying heuristics rather than extensive [[algorithm]]ic processing. Soon, this idea spread beyond academic psychology, into law, medicine, and political science. This research questioned the descriptive adequacy of idealized models of judgment, and offered insights into the [[cognitive process]]es that explained human error without invoking motivated [[irrationality]].<ref name="books.google.com">{{Cite book |last1=Gilovich |first1=Thomas |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=FfTVDY-zrCoC&q=history+overview+OR+OR+OR+definition+%22availability+heuristics%22&pg=PR11 |title=Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment |last2=Griffin |first2=Dale |last3=Kahneman |first3=Daniel |date=2002-07-08 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |isbn=9780521796798}}</ref> One simplifying strategy people may rely on is the tendency to make a judgment about the frequency of an event based on how many similar instances are brought to mind. In 1973, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman first studied this phenomenon and labeled it the "availability heuristic". An availability heuristic is a mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to a given person's mind when evaluating a specific topic, concept, method, or decision. As follows, people tend to use a readily available fact to base their beliefs on a comparably distant concept. There has been much research done with this heuristic, but studies on the issue are still questionable with regard to the underlying process. Studies illustrate that manipulations intended to increase the subjective experience of ease of recall are also likely to affect the amount of recall. Furthermore, this makes it difficult to determine whether the obtained estimates of frequency, likelihood, or typicality are based on participants' phenomenal experiences or on a biased sample of recalled information.<ref name="books.google.com" />

However, some textbooks have chosen the latter interpretation introducing the availability heuristic as "one's judgments are always based on what comes to mind".{{citation needed|date=August 2024}} For example, if a person is asked whether there are more words in the English language that start with a k or have k as the third letter, the person will probably be able to think of more words that begin with the letter k, concluding incorrectly that k is more [[letter frequency|frequent]] as the first letter than the third.<ref>{{Cite news |last1=Gilovich, T. D. |last2=Griffin, D. |last3=Kahneman, D. |date=2002 |title=Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment |publisher=New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.}}</ref> In this Wikipedia article itself, for example, there are multiple instances of words such as "likely", "make", "take", "ask" and indeed "Wikipedia", but (aside from names) only a couple of initial K's: "know" and "key".