... heuristics, but we shall concentrate on only one of them: frequency judgements, or availability heuristic. Ideally we would always engage ourselves into a systematic and deep elaboration of any given problem, by defining it and generating alternative solutions to the problem, before making our final decision about the matter (Chaiken, 1980; Fiske & Taylor, 1991). But this is impossible since deep elaboration is very time consuming and our short term memory is limited in its capacity to hold such large amount of information at once (Mitchell, 2003). Moreover, we often simply do not have the knowledge and the relevant information required to analyse every aspect of the problem (Carlson, 2002). We are thus likely to engage into a reasoned thought if the issue is one that matters to us, but very often we base our judgement on partial information following heuristics. (Gleitman, 1999; Carlson, 2002). Cognitive heuristics are very useful ...

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