Familiarity heuristic

In psychology, a heuristic is an easy-to-compute procedure or "rule of thumb" that people use when forming beliefs, judgments or decisions. The familiarity heuristic was developed based on the discovery of the availability heuristic by psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman; it happens when the familiar is favored over novel places, people, things. The familiarity heuristic can be applied to various situations that individuals experience in day-to-day life. When these situations appear similar to previous situations, especially if the individuals are experiencing a high cognitive load, they may regress back to the state of mind in which they have felt or behaved before. This heuristic is useful in most situations and can be applied to many fields of knowledge, however, there are both positives and negatives to this heuristic as well.

The familiarity heuristic stems from the availability heuristic which was studied by Tversky and Kahneman. The availability heuristic suggests that the likelihood of events is estimated based on how many examples of such events come to mind. Thus the familiarity heuristic shows how "bias of availability is related to the ease of recall."

Tversky and Kahneman created an experiment in order to test this heuristic. They devised four lists of 39 names. Each list contained 19 female names and 20 male names. Half of the lists had famous female names, and the other half had famous male names. They showed the lists to two test groups. The first group was shown a list and asked to recall as many names as possible. The second group was shown a list and asked to determine if there were more female or more male names. The subjects who heard the list with famous female names said there were more female names than there were male names. Similarly, the subjects who heard the list with famous male names recalled more male names than female names. Thus the familiarity heuristic is defined as "judging events as more frequent or important because they are more familiar in memory."

The familiarity heuristic is based on using schemas or past actions as a scaffold for behavior in a new (yet familiar) situation. This is useful because it saves time for the subject who is trying to figure out the appropriate behavior for a situation they have experienced before. Individuals automatically assume that their previous behavior will yield the same results when a similar situation arises. This technique is typically useful. However, certain behaviors can be inappropriate when the situation is different from the time before.

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