Social Identity, Availability and the Perception of Risk

Abstract

The present study investigated the social and relational bases of the availability bias. The availability heuristic refers to the tendency to judge events to be more likely or frequent when instances thereof come more easily to mind (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973). Tversky and Kahneman (1973) cite the example of a tendency to overestimate the risk of road accidents after witnessing an accident because of the availability of such vivid information during judgment. We argue that the availability of information can be a function of the relevance of such information to the perceiver. Following self-categorization theory (Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher & Wetherell, 1987) we predicted that the self-relevance of target information would be enhanced where target and perceiver share a common group membership or social identity, providing a basis for assumed similarity. This led to the hypothesis that availability and judgments of risk would be greater when prior information about a road accident implicated an ingroup rat...