Judgment and Decision Making (Jul 2006)
The availability heuristic in the classroom
Abstract
This paper extends previous research showing that experienced difficulty of recall can influence evaluative judgments (e.g., Winkielman and Schwarz, 2001) to a field study of university students rating a course. Students completed a mid-course evaluation form in which they were asked to list either 2 ways in which the course could be improved (a relatively easy task) or 10 ways in which the course could be improved (a relatively difficult task). Respondents who had been asked for 10 critical comments subsequently rated the course more favorably than respondents who had been asked for 2 critical comments. An internal analysis suggests that the number of critiques solicited provides a frame against which accessibility of instances is evaluated. The paper concludes with a discussion of implications of the present results and possible directions
