What heuristic involves making decisions based on the most readily available information?

The availability heuristic is a mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to a person's mind when evaluating a specific topic, concept, method, or decision. This cognitive bias suggests that if something readily springs to mind, individuals tend to believe it is more common or more likely to occur. For instance, if someone often sees news stories about airplane crashes, they might overestimate the risk of flying because this striking information is more available in their memory.

This heuristic is particularly significant when individuals are faced with uncertainty or a lack of complete data because they often turn to what they know or what they have experienced recently. Consequently, decisions may be influenced more by vividness and recency of memory rather than by all relevant facts and statistics, which can lead to skewed perceptions of reality and risk.

In contrast, the representativeness heuristic involves categorizing situations based on how similar they are to prototypes that one has in mind, which does not necessarily rely on available information. The anchoring heuristic refers to the tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information encountered (the "anchor") when making decisions. Lastly, the framing effect highlights how presenting the same information in different ways can influence decisions. Therefore, the unique characteristic of the availability heuristic is