What you see is not all there is
How availability heuristics distort our perceptions
🏷️ Categories: Memory, Decision making and biases.
Our point of view is our window into reality.
Not reality.
We spend the day capturing information through our senses, perhaps too much.
Most of it falls into oblivion instantly and much of it soon after, but a small part will remain in our memory, like sediment settling to the bottom of a container of water. This accumulated information is the memory we use to judge the world, understand who we are and decide on the future.
Unfortunately, memory is like our entire body: fallible and malleable.
One of the most important phenomena that demonstrate how fallible our memory is is the availability heuristic. This is a mental shortcut that we unconsciously use to quickly estimate the probability of an event occurring based on how easy it is to remember similar examples.
You think something is more common or likely if you remember similar cases easily.
This mental process affects our decision making, risk perception, finances, personal relationships and many other areas of our lives. I have mentioned the availability heuristic a few times, but we never dig into it in depth.
Let's see how it affects us and what techniques we can use to avoid falling into it.
What are availability heuristics?
The human brain is not a supercomputer, it has limitations.
As we cannot process all the information available in every situation, our brain uses simple rules that reduce the mental effort to make quick decisions. Usually these rules work well, but sometimes they can lead us to incorrect conclusions or not so good decisions...
Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman discovered this crucial phenomenon in 1973.
Typical cases of availability heuristics
1. Extraordin1ary accidents
Most believe that shark attacks are a far more common cause of death than they actually are. In fact, it is 30 times more likely to die from being struck by lightning, which is also extremely rare (Sunstein, 2002). Get an idea of how dangerous the waters are, in 2023 there were only 69 strikes on the entire planet, yes, the entire planet (Florida Musem).
Why then are so many people wrong?
The amount of media coverage and movies featuring shark attacks in shocking ways has made it a memorable event for many people. Whenever a case happens it becomes news. In fact, after the “Jaws” movie, fear increased and people swam closer to shore (Francis, 2012).
So you fall into the availability heuristic: “More memories = more likely”.
2. Spurts and chance
Spurts do not assure that the streak will continue, and the scarcity of streaks does not announce a next streak.
It was seen in basketball, where players believed that those who had made several baskets in a row without missing would continue to score. This caused others on the team to pass the ball more to that person even though their performance was as usual (Miller & Sanjurjo, 2015). We think that a random event is more likely because it happened previously or, conversely, that it is likely to happen now because we have no close memories in time and “it's his turn” (even though the probabilities remain identical for each throw, attempt, or occasion).
The brain is a marvel.
Are you going to buy a lottery this year?
Let's see if it's your turn.
3. Road and air accidents
Did you see anyone scared to get into a car?
The media coverage of a plane crash is brutal and we all have catastrophic images from movies and news stories in our brains, but car crashes get 10 seconds on the news before they change the subject and fall into oblivion.
Many people feel that flying is dangerous even though statistics say otherwise.
“People tend to obsess about both highly desirable outcomes, such as winning the lottery, and deeply undesirable outcomes, such as a plane crash” (Tversky and Kahneman, 1973).
The most extraordinary cases are the most memorable.
You don't get them out of your head and you overvalue them.
What if you win the lottery this year?
Factors that increase the availability heuristic
The effect is so powerful and so present because of several factors:
Temporal proximity: the closer in time the memorable event is, the clearer it is in your memory and the more it influences your decisions and behavior. Your brain overvalues the memory because it is more accurate (Bu, 2023; Efendić, 2021).
Repetition: Constant repetition of topics makes them seem more important. A brutal example is diseases and social problems (Keller et al., 2006; Efendić, 2021). Murders are a news focus, but the reality is that the homicide rate has been declining for many years and there are 14 times more suicides per 100,000 inhabitants in Spain (Instituto Nacional de Estadística). Suicide does not have even 1% of the media coverage that murder has.
Emotional association: If it generates intense emotions, it is easily consolidated in the memory. This emotional connection makes you quickly evoke the memory in similar situations and begin to overvalue it (Slovic et al., 2005).
Personal closeness: If you or someone in your circle has experienced something like a robbery or car accident, you will feel it is a greater risk than someone who only heard about it indirectly (McDowell & Pachur, 2020). Those who have a family member with a disease are more aware of it.
How to avoid falling into the availability heuristic
It's hard to avoid it, but there are some techniques to minimize it.
Diversify: Don't limit yourself to one source, especially if it proves you right. Seek out varied and reliable information that goes against your perspective, so you gain a broader perspective of reality. You see, just because you see a lot of something doesn't mean it's that frequent or important. Look elsewhere.
Compare: Put everything in its place when comparing it to other rates or ratios and avoid judging its importance based on your perception. By comparing the traffic accident rate to airplane crashes you put it in context. The same with the rate of homicides, robberies, suicides... An isolated data not nothing.
Look at the past: The recent weighs more just for being recent. Don't rely on your memory and check historical records to see how exceptional an event is. A typical mistake is to plan from memory, because you will give more value to recent months than to previous months and years.
✍️ Your turn: Is there something you always overestimated and then discovered it wasn't what you thought it was? I have long been afraid of flying.
💭 Quote of the day: “Many of the events whose probability we want to evaluate depend on a large number of factors that are related to each other. It is extremely difficult for the human mind to comprehend these sequences and variations of so many factors.” Tversky & Kahneman, (1973).
See you next time! 👋
References 📚
Bu, Z. (2023). Research on the Availability Heuristic and its Application. Advances In Economics Management And Political Sciences, 17(1), 171-175. URL
Dimara, E., Dragicevic, P., & Bezerianos, A. (2016). Accounting for Availability Biases in Information Visualization.
Efendić, E. (2021). How do People Judge Risk? Availability may Upstage Affect in the Construction of Risk Judgments. Risk Analysis, 41(11), 2003-2015. URL
Florida Museum. Yearly Worldwide Shark Attack Summary. URL
Francis, B. (2012). “Before and After ‘Jaws’: Changing Representations of Shark Attacks. The Great Circle, 34(2), 44–64. URL
Instituto Nacional de Estadística. Tasa de homicidios y criminalidad URL
Instituto Nacional de Estadística. Suicidios por edad y sexo. INE. URL
Keller, C., Siegrist, M., & Gutscher, H. (2006). The Role of the Affect and Availability Heuristics in Risk Communication. Risk Analysis, 26(3), 631-639. URL
McDowell, M., & Pachur, T. (2020). Availability, Affect, and Decisions to Seek Information about Cancer Risks. Medical Decision Making, 40(8), 941-945. URL
Miller, J. B., & Sanjurjo, A. (2015). Surprised by the Gambler’s and Hot Hand Fallacies? A Truth in the Law of Small Numbers. SSRN Electronic Journal. URL
Slovic, P., Peters, E., Finucane, M. L., & MacGregor, D. G. (2005). Affect, risk, and decision making. Health Psychology, 24(4, Suppl), S35-S40. URL
Sunstein, C. R. (2002). The perception of risk. Harvard Law Review, 115, 1119. URL
Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1973). Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability. Cognitive Psychology, 5(2), 207-232. URL
Beautiful and helpful article