{"id":1099,"slug":"tversky-kahneman-1973-availability-recency-vs-once-burned","title":"Tversky & Kahneman 1973 (Cognitive Psychology) — availability heuristic; why \"once burned\" is NOT just recency bias","kind":"reference","scope":"business","status":"current","audiences":["kevin","candid-team"],"topics":["psychology-aversion","behavioral-economics","trust-repair"],"reference_body":"**Claim:** Tversky and Kahneman's 1973 paper \"Availability: A Heuristic for Judging Frequency and Probability\" established the availability heuristic — and thereby what is usually called recency bias: a general overweighting of recently-encountered information when estimating frequency or probability.\n\n**Source:** Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1973). *Cognitive Psychology* 5(2): 207–232.\n\n**Confidence:** Verified.\n\n**For Candid — the \"once burned\" pattern is more specific than recency:** A GC who has been burned does not simply *remember* the last vendor more vividly. He performs a **structural reweighting of the probability estimate of vendor failure across the entire category**, combined with a **shift in the decision rule from expected-value to maximin** (avoid worst case). Three distinct mechanisms beyond availability:\n\n1. Disposition effect / narrow framing over realized losses — [[shefrin-statman-1985-disposition-effect-narrow-framing]]\n2. Asymmetric trust updating after competence vs integrity violations — [[kim-ferrin-cooper-dirks-2004-competence-vs-integrity-trust-repair]]\n3. Negativity dominance over arithmetic averaging — [[rozin-royzman-2001-negativity-dominance]]\n\nTreating once-burned as \"just recency bias\" leads to the wrong intervention. Recency would predict the effect fades with time; the underlying mechanisms do not predict that.","rationale_body":null,"metadata":null,"links":{"outgoing":[{"slug":"research-brief-risk-aversion-post-failure-may-2026","title":"Research brief: risk aversion, loss aversion, and post-failure decision patterns in GC and trades-business decision-makers (May 2026)","kind":"reference","scope":"business","link_type":"relates-to"},{"slug":"shefrin-statman-1985-disposition-effect-narrow-framing","title":"Shefrin & Statman 1985 (JoF) — disposition effect; narrow-framing / mental accounting of each vendor as separate account","kind":"reference","scope":"business","link_type":"relates-to"},{"slug":"kim-ferrin-cooper-dirks-2004-competence-vs-integrity-trust-repair","title":"Kim, Ferrin, Cooper, Dirks 2004 (JAP) — competence violations repair via apology; integrity violations repair via denial; opposite mechanisms","kind":"reference","scope":"business","link_type":"relates-to"},{"slug":"rozin-royzman-2001-negativity-dominance","title":"Rozin & Royzman 2001 (PSPR) — negativity bias / negativity dominance; bad weighs more than the algebraic sum of equivalent goods","kind":"reference","scope":"business","link_type":"relates-to"}],"incoming":[]},"created_at":"2026-05-25T13:13:30.996Z","updated_at":"2026-05-25T13:13:30.996Z"}