Hi, I'm Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In this video and the next
few videos we're going to look at some examples of heuristics. So heuristics are
these mental shortcuts that we use when we're solving problems and making
decisions. The heuristics that we'll look at are mostly going to come from
the work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. Tversky and Kahneman
essentially provided the foundation for a new field of study known as behavioral
economics. Behavioral economics is a combination of economics and psychology
and it questions this traditional economic assumption that people act
rationally, right? That people make rational choices in order to optimize their
output. What behavioral economics does is show actually people don't act
rationally very often. They rely on heuristics when they're making decisions
and this means that they're going to make predictable types of errors in their
decision-making. Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for this research in
2002 and Tversky would certainly have shared the prize although unfortunately
he had passed away in 1996 and wasn't eligible. If you'd like to find out
more about Tversky and Kahneman's research and behavioral economics in
general I highly recommend Daniel Kahneman's book Thinking Fast and Slow.
Ok, so let's look at an example of one of these heuristics. This first one is
the availability heuristic. So the availability heuristic is something that
might occur whenever we're trying to answer the question of "how frequent is X?".
This is a hard question to answer. So here's an example that Tversky and
Kahneman used. They asked participants to estimate "do you think English has more
words that start with the letter K or more words that have K as the third
letter?". You can think about this yourself. Which do you think is more frequent? If
you're like most of the participants you probably think that there's more words
that start with the letter K than have K as the third letter. If you think this
way, you're wrong because there's actually nearly three times as many
words that have K as the third letter than words that start with the letter K.
So why was this so hard to get correct? Well it turns out this question of how
frequent something is is really difficult.
How frequent is X? It's like I don't know where to begin answering that question.
How do I estimate the frequency of something? So our minds really aren't
equipped to answer this question but rather than admitting defeat
what they do is they substitute a different question. This is a
question that's a little bit easier for our mind to answer. So what's the
question that we substitute?
The question that we ask instead and we don't realize that we've switched
them is "how easily does X come to mind?". There's a question that can be answered.
Just try to bring it to mind and see how easy or hard it is and the idea is we
make the assumption that if something is easy to bring to mind, you know, if I can
come up with a lot of examples of something, it's probably common. So it's
probably a frequent event but if it's really hard to bring something to mind I
can't come up with any examples then it's probably not very frequent. This
is probably what happened with this question about the letter K. The thing is
it's easy to bring words to mind based on their first letter. It's hard to bring
them to mind based on their third letter but this actually doesn't have anything
to do with their frequency, right? It comes with how we think about words. It's easy
to bring them to mind by the first letter even if they're not particularly
frequent. So you can think about words that start with the letter K and
you can come up with a list pretty easily; kitchen, kite, kick, kangaroo, but
when you try to think about words with K as their third letter, it's hard to do.
We're not used to thinking about words this way and so it's not a question
that you normally ask and even if you see words with K as the third letter you
might not acknowledge it. So it's harder to bring words of that ilk to
mind. Ok, so of course this heuristic is used more than just when we're thinking
about words and letters, right? It's really used whenever we have this
question about frequency. How frequent is X? That's hard to do so our mind uses a
shortcut, says "well how easily can I think of examples of it? I'll
estimate frequency based on that". This is why people are more afraid to
ride on a plane than in a car, even though they're much more likely to be
injured or killed in a car crash than in a plane crash because when people ask
"How frequently do planes crash?" they can think of examples of plane crashes
really easily because they're memorable right? We see big news stories about
them and so people think about plane crashes and they bring several to mind
but when it comes to car crashes, there's thousands and thousands of car crashes
every year that we simply don't hear about.
So we can't bring those examples to mind and as a result we assume that car
crashes are less frequent than they actually are and that plane crashes are more
frequent than they actually are. Now we also see this when parents think about
their children's behavior. We have parents that won't let their children
walk to school because of fear of child abductions. Child abductions are
incredibly rare; they almost never happen, right? But when they do happen, we hear
about them. The big news stories, this means we can bring them to mind
easily and that means we think that they're more frequent than they actually
are. And other behaviors that are actually real risks to children that are
common, we don't think of as being much of a problem. So I mean parents will
drive their kids to school even though the risk of being injured in a car
crash is much greater than the risk of being abducted by a predator. Or, you know,
we let children eat hot dogs. The risk of choking to death on a
hotdog is a greater risk to a child than an abduction or a risk of drowning, but,
you know, we let kids go to barbecues and pool parties without a second thought.
Yet those are things that post real risks to children, whereas the risk of
child abduction is nearly zero but because of how we bring things to mind
and how we estimate frequency, we are likely to overestimate the risk of
certain things and underestimate the risks of others. Ok, so that's
essentially the availability heuristic; this idea that we aren't good at
estimating frequency and so we base it on how available things are to our mind.
How easily do they come to mind, and we estimate frequency based on that. Ok, I
hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the
channel for more. Thanks for watching!