M. Manis et al., AVAILABILITY HEURISTIC IN JUDGMENTS OF SET SIZE AND FREQUENCY OF OCCURRENCE, Journal of personality and social psychology, 65(3), 1993, pp. 448-457
The availability heuristic has been widely cited as an important facto
r in the judgment process. However, the evidence that availability is
important in judging category size is not fully convincing. Moreover,
several reports suggest that availability may not be a factor in judgi
ng frequency of occurrence. Path analysis was used in 3 experiments de
signed to assess the role of memorial availability in judgments of cat
egory size and frequency of occurrence. In judging set size, there was
consistent support for the availability heuristic; that is, set size
judgments were reliably influenced by the contents of memory. By contr
ast, in accordance with earlier results, availability was not a signif
icant factor when Ss judged frequency of occurrence.