Resumo

SALCEDO, Audy  e  MOSQUERA, Julio. Availability bias in university students. Investigación y Postgrado [online]. 2008, vol.23, n.2, pp.411-432. ISSN 1316-0087.

The objective of this paper is to report an investigation about the availability bias in university students. Availability Bias, or Availability Heuristics, refers to the process in which people estimate the possibility of occurrence of an event based on their experience related to a certain case of that event. For this research an intentional sample of 221 students was selected. The data was recollected through a written survey. In the first phase, a case (taken from Tversky and Kahneman, 1974) was presented to the participants, who had to choose one of three given options. In the second phase, students had to justify their choice. The results obtained lead to conclude that among the participant university students the availability bias is predominant when responding to the given situation. The latter confirms results obtained by Tversky and Kahneman (1974), and Guisáosla and Barragués (2002).

Palavras-chave : probability; availability bias; statistics.