When people overestimate the frequency of violent crimes because these events generate a great deal of media coverage, they are using ________________.

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BlackTom AI · Accepted Answer

We start by restating the situation: people overestimate the frequency of violent crimes because media coverage highlights these events, which leads to a cognitive bias in judgment.
Option 1: 'the availability heuristic' is the idea that people judge the likelihood of events based on how easily examples come to mind, often amplified by media coverage. This directly explains why vivid crime coverage can inflate perceived danger.
Option 2: 'algorithms' refers to computational procedures used for processing data and making predictions. While powerful, this choice does not describe a cognitive bias in everyday misperception of crime frequency.
Option 3: 'analogies' involve reasoning by comparing two cases to draw conclusions. Although analogies can influence thinking, they do not capture the specific bias of overestimating frequency due to memorable events.
Option 4: 'the representativeness heuristic' is about assessing probability by how much something resembles a typical case. While related to quick judgments, it focuses on similarity judgments rather than the frequency bias driven by vivid media coverage.
In this context, the described phenomenon aligns best with the availability heuristic, where salient, well-publicized events disproportionately shape perceptions of frequency. The other options fail to capture this exact mechanism: they either describe different reasoning processes or refer to tools rather than cognitive biases. Specifically, media-driven vividness increases recallability, making people think violent crimes are more common than they are, which is the hallmark of the availability heuristic.

PSY 1001 (001) Final Exam/Exam 4

When people overestimate the frequency of violent crimes because these events generate a great deal of media coverage, they are using ________________.

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