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Availability heuristic 0:51
A 51-second explainer of Availability heuristic, narrated over the same demo you can try yourself.
Try the interactive Availability heuristic demo
What this video covers
The availability heuristic is the mental shortcut of judging how likely or common something is by how easily examples spring to mind. Vivid, recent or often-repeated things feel more frequent than they are, so what you remember seeing - not what actually happened - drives your sense of the odds.
You saw the dramatic item again and again, so your gut said it was everywhere - but the jar tells the truth: it was always rare. That gap is the availability heuristic. What's repeated and vivid feels frequent, whatever the real mix is, which is exactly why one loud headline can reshape what a whole audience believes is common.
