What is availability heuristic examples?

Availability heuristic examples is a concept in personal epistemology: You overestimate the likelihood of events you can easily recall examples of. The availability heuristic substitutes the question "how frequent is this?" with the question "how easily can I think of an example?" — and the substitution happens below conscious awareness, which means you feel like you are reasoning about probability when you are actually reasoning about the vividness of your memory.

Example: After watching three consecutive news segments about home invasions, you check the locks on your doors twice before bed and consider installing a security system. You have lived in the same neighborhood for six years without incident. The local crime rate has been declining steadily. Nothing in your environment has changed — but your perceived risk has spiked because vivid examples are now loaded in your memory. You are not responding to a change in actual danger. You are responding to a change in the ease with which danger-related scenarios come to mind. The news did not make your neighborhood less safe. It made threat scenarios more mentally available, and your brain treated that availability as evidence of frequency.

This concept is part of Phase 8 (Perceptual Calibration) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for perceptual calibration.