Availability heuristic or availability bias in psychology

The availability heuristic refers to a mental process of forming a judgment or making a decision based on information that readily comes to mind rather than a careful analysis of all relevant information.

Psychological scientists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman are credited with the research supporting the existence of the availability heuristic or bias.

People tend to give more weight to recent or easily recalled information instead of searching for all the relevant information when making a decision.

Factors contributing to "availability."

Recency bias- Recent information gets more weight because it is more easily recalled. Obviously, in serious matters, older information may be more or equally relevant.

Consequences- When the consequences or outcomes of an event are easy to remember, those consequences appear greater than do others.

Frequency and probability- When people easily recall information about an event, they are apt to overestimate its frequency or the probability of the event occurring. Airline accidents in the news can lead to seriously overestimating the risk of flying.

Problems with the availability heuristic- When people make a quick decision based on easily available information, they may make a serious mistake. The process of thinking about all the relevant evidence can be too slow and effortful for many people, but in some cases, a careful analysis is critical to health and wellbeing.

Another term: Availability bias

Learn more about heuristics in Thinking, Fast and Slow by Kahneman

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Microfriendships

Microfriendships are brief friendly interactions with others characterized by kindness and resulting in happy feelings. Examples include pleasant conversations with a stranger in a subway, a taxi driver, a store clerk, or restaurant waitstaff.

Learn more in an essay on this topic by David Myers "The Happy Science of Micro-Friendships."

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Negative Reinforcer, Reinforcement

 A negative reinforcer is a stimulus that results in an increase in behavior when it is removed following a specific behavior.

The procedure of removing the stimulus and the resulting increase in behavior is called negative reinforcement. Reinforcement means to strengthen. The connection between the behavior and the reinforcer is strengthened when the behavior regularly increases contingent on the removal of the stimulus. 

Negative Reinforcement is often confused with punishment even among graduate students. The term negative in the phrase negative reinforcement is used in a mathematical sense of subtracting a stimulus form a situation. The removal of the negative reinforcer is symbolized as S- or Sav where S = stimulus and - means subtraction. The av = aversive. 

Negative reinforcement is contrasted with positive reinforcement.

Key words: negative reinforcer, negative reinforcement, aversive stimulus, behavioral psychology

Example:

A child has a habit of screaming when they do not get their way. A parent gives in to the child to end the aversive screaming behavior. If the removal of screaming behavior is routinely followed by getting parent permission then the aversive stimulus of screaming functions as a negative reinforcer for the parent's permission giving behavior.

The squeaky wheel gets the grease is a proverb illustrating an observation that an aversive situation results in desirable behavior. An employee who routinely complains about a work situation may activate administrative behavior to rectify a problem in order to end the aversive stimulus of complaining. Of course, an administrator could choose to fire the employee so, what works in a lab won't always work in real life settings.

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