Cognitive Abilities Test (CAT4) Practice Exam

The availability heuristic is a cognitive bias focused on how easily examples come to mind and can affect decision-making. When an individual learns about a new idea or product, this information is fresh and readily accessible in their memory. Because it is top-of-mind, they may mistakenly believe that the idea or product is more popular than it actually is, based on their recent exposure to it. The ease of recalling this newer information skews their perception, leading them to overestimate its prevalence among others.

In contrast, other biases like survivorship bias are concerned with the selective outcomes of successful cases and overlook failures, while hindsight bias influences how one interprets past events as having been predictable after they have occurred. Optimism bias leads individuals to believe that they are less likely to experience negative events relative to others. These other cognitive biases do not specifically relate to the overestimation of popularity based on recent experiences as the availability heuristic does.