Wally and Sharon's Dinner Date Decision
What psychological concept does Wally's response illustrate?
Wally and Sharon are out on a date. When Sharon asks Wally where they should go for dinner, Wally says "My coworkers keep telling me about that new Japanese place downtown, so it must be a great place to eat." Wally’s response illustrates the use of a(n):
- Confirmation bias
- Availability heuristic
- Representativeness heuristic
- Anchoring and adjustment heuristic
Answer:
Wally’s response illustrates the use of an availability heuristic.
The Availability heuristic depicts our propensity to imagine that anything that is least demanding for us to call ought to give the best setting to future predictions. Tversky and Kahneman's (1973) contends that individuals now and again judge the recurrence of occasions in the world based on the ease with which examples come to mind.
When forced to make a decision, we rely on what is inferred quickly, which is a convenient mental shortcut. However, Wally's reliance on this shortcut undermines her ability to accurately judge frequency and probability.