The Process That Leads to Judgment by Accessibility

The process that leads to judgment by availability appears to involve a complex chain of reasoning. The subjects have an experience of diminishing fluency as they produce instances. They evidently have expectations about the rate at which fluency decreases. And thse expectations are wrong. It is the unexpectedly low fluency that causes people who were asked for 12 instances to describe themselves as unassertive. When the surprise is eliminated, low fluency no longer influences the judgment.