Saylor URL: http://www.saylor.org/books Saylor.org
Campbell, 1992; Tversky & Kahneman, 1973). [23] Imagine, for instance, that I asked you to
indicate whether there are more words in the English language that begin with the letter “R” or
that have the letter “R” as the third letter. You would probably answer this question by trying to
think of words that have each of the characteristics, thinking of all the words you know that
begin with “R” and all that have “R” in the third position. Because it is much easier to retrieve
words by their first letter than by their third, we may incorrectly guess that there are more words
that begin with “R,” even though there are in fact more words that have “R” as the third letter.
The availability heuristic may also operate on episodic memory. We may think that our friends
are nice people, because we see and remember them primarily when they are around us (their
friends, who they are, of course, nice to). And the traffic might seem worse in our own
neighborhood than we think it is in other places, in part because nearby traffic jams are more
easily retrieved than are traffic jams that occur somewhere else.
Salience and Cognitive Accessibility
Still another potential for bias in memory occurs because we are more likely to attend to, and
thus make use of and remember, some information more than other information. For one, we
tend to attend to and remember things that are highly salient, meaning that they attract our
attention. Things that are unique, colorful, bright, moving, and unexpected are more salient
(McArthur & Post, 1977; Taylor & Fiske, 1978). [24] In one relevant study, Loftus, Loftus, and
Messo (1987) [25] showed people images of a customer walking up to a bank teller and pulling
out either a pistol or a checkbook. By tracking eye movements, the researchers determined that
people were more likely to look at the gun than at the checkbook, and that this reduced their
ability to accurately identify the criminal in a lineup that was given later. The salience of the gun
drew people’s attention away from the face of the criminal.
The salience of the stimuli in our social worlds has a big influence on our judgment, and in some
cases may lead us to behave in ways that we might better not have. Imagine, for instance, that
you wanted to buy a new music player for yourself. You’ve been trying to decide whether to get
the iPod or the Zune. You checked Consumer Reports online and found that, although the
players differed on many dimensions, including price, battery life, ability to share music, and so