2. Mental Models
Overview
Bias of both systems, but tend to manifest more on individuals which let them be guided by the first system1. The minimum number of examples to be remembered is zero, sometimes you just need a feel. For example, you don’t need to remember specific articles to have a rough idea of the relative mentioning frequency of nations. To discover how the heuristic gets to bias just list the factors, other than frequency, that makes finding examples easy. Each factor will be a potential bias source. Some examples include:
- an important event that attracts our attention gets easily retrieved
- a dramatic event temporarily increases availability
- experiences, images and vivid memories are more available In general, fluidity is much more important than the raw number, bounded by the expectation. There are expectations about a progressive lower fluidity, but the unexpected low fluidity will condition the final decision. But if the surprise is eliminated (for example, that saying a certain external factor will lower the memory) then the bad fluidity won’t influence the judgment.
Among the fundamental characteristics of System 1 is the ability to establish expectations and to be surprised when they are violated. The system also recovers the possible causes of a surprise. In addition, System 2 is able to reset the expectations of System 1 on the fly.
Concluding, availability is a system 1 heuristic, and there’s substitution on the content whenever the second system is busy.
Some conditions facilitating availability bias:
- when they are absorbed in another task
- when they are in a good mood because they have thought back to a happy episode
- when they have a low score on the depression scale
- when they are fairly knowledgeable novices on the subject
- when they have a high score on the trust in intuition scale
- when they are (or others make them feel) powerful
References
Footnotes
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the intuitive one ↩