The Availability Heuristic

I recently bumped into a fascinating term with which I was quite familiar by practice, but not by name. It is called the Availability Heuristic. The link will go to a wiki page with a more precise definition and some examples of how the phenomenon applies in various categories of life.

In short, the availability heuristic is a mental phenomenon in which a person relies upon the recall of information that can be brought easily to mind to form the basis for opinions and decisions. (The word heuristic is a fancy term for ”problem-solving” or ”decision-making”.)